


no rays from the holy heaven come down

by eluvion



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Aggressively headcannoning, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, If you only read one work by me, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Party Poison (Danger Days), POV Second Person, The Girl needs a hug, TheElusiveOllie if you read this thank you, Whump, bridges the gap between the music videos and the comics, filling plot holes, please read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:40:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23403700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluvion/pseuds/eluvion
Summary: You watch as the world burns away, again and again around you. You see the rise and fall of the Fabulous Killjoys. You see the soul of the desert change over time. You are the one that sets BLi ablaze; you are the bomb that turns it to dust.But every bomb starts as scraps—metal and batteries and chemicals set into a chain reaction. The metal is your childhood. The battery is the power you never realize you have. The chemicals are the truth that you spend years uncovering and learning.This is how you build a bomb.
Relationships: The Fabulous Four & the Girl, The Girl & Original characters
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26





	no rays from the holy heaven come down

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [don't tell me to rest in peace while you're still picking the bones of my memory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19710787) by [omegalomania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omegalomania/pseuds/omegalomania). 
  * Inspired by [all your failures will die starry-eyed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21260918) by [omegalomania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omegalomania/pseuds/omegalomania). 



> Hi, so I’m back again. I have more friends now so that’s nice. I don’t really have a lot to say here except that I am “on hiatus” for Ripples of Space and Time and I don’t know if I’ll ever be off hiatus.  
>   
> This work is inspired by [TheElusiveOllie’s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie) [pray for disaster (when the world is razed we’ll still be burning)](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1509731) series. Please read it; it’s beautiful. Here’s their [Tumblr](https://graffitibible.tumblr.com/).  
>   
> I changed a few details from both canon and TheElusiveOllie’s version. The main ones are that I made the Girl a little younger when she gets taken from the City and a bit older when she begins the events of the comics. I didn’t actually write any scenes from the comics. I foreshadowed and alluded to some of them, but I decided not to rewrite the entire comic series (mostly because it was already written and I don’t have the patience for that). This is written in second person, which took some getting used to (for me at least), and it’s from the POV of the Girl, not an OC. This follows the Girl’s story from the beginning of her life to the events of the comics; it bridges the gap between SING and the first comic. I do have a few OCs later on, but the most important characters shown here are either canon or fanon.  
>   
> Thanks to the best editors in the world [Katie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illyrian_Shadowhunter) and [Cat](https://night-lightning17.tumblr.com) for editing, and in Katie’s case, rewriting scenes for this monster.  
>   
> Here’s my [tumblr](https://eluvion.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk/ask questions/do whatever. Anywayyy this was really fun to write, so enjoy!!!  
>   
> The wonderful [tapefish](https://tapefish.tumblr.com/) made [some art](https://tapefish.tumblr.com/post/615892402584092672/from-this-fic-by-nightwing-hunter-cause-i-got) for this fic, so show them some love!

Your earliest memory is white. An endless sea of white, every wall, every edge blank and straight and perfect. There are no ripped edges in Battery City, and there is no freedom. You are too young to understand this, too young to understand the nature of freedom.

So you spend your early years in a cloud made from the pills, fog clouding the inside of your head. You are too young to understand freedom, but there has always been something wrong. 

It is like searching through fog with only a flashlight, searching for something that you do not know. You cannot find what you’re looking for, you don’t even know what it is, but something is in the fog with you. Your flashlight is useless, it only reflects off of the fog, but it’s better than being in the dark. You don’t even know what you’re looking for, but you _know_ it’s there. It’s somewhere here, you can feel it.

Sometimes you catch a glimpse through the fog. You see something there, lost among the white blankness. A flash of color reaches your eyes. You hear something that almost seems like music. You see a line that turns into art in your head. You see a bit of color in the broken sky or the world shifts in just the right way. Every time you see a bit out of that fog, you wonder if something’s wrong with you.

No one else knows what you are talking about. You’ve _tried_ explaining it to them, but they don’t understand.

They never understand.

So you learn to keep quiet and keep your thoughts to yourself. But you watch, and you wait, because, sometimes, _sometimes_ you catch a glimpse of something, and you remember what seeing through that fog is like.

* * *

When they take you from the City, you are four years old. 

You are sitting in the waiting room of the large Better Living building, waiting for the doctor to come. He never does. Instead, someone else walks in.

They’re covered in color. That’s the first thing you notice. They have bright red hair and a blue jacket and they don’t smile. Something about that pulls you to them.

You have heard the stories before, from the corners of hallways, when they had thought you were asleep. They had whispered in horror about terrorists, about the Zones outside the City, the rampant hatred that bled through the desert. You had heard about the too-bright colors, the too-loud music, the fire and the passion. They had thought you were asleep, but you had always been listening.

That is why you take a step to the door. 

The second thing you notice is that they aren’t smiling. Everyone around you has always smiled, too bright and too big to be real. The person at the door isn’t smiling. 

Instead, something in their eyes _burns._ You can’t tell what it is, but it draws you in, 

So you take their outstretched hand and you follow them out of Battery City.

* * *

The desert holds so much color. It’s everywhere, clothes and hair and guns and sand. It almost makes up for the lack of color in the City. 

The desert has so _much_. You want to drown in it all, to take in the colors and the sounds and the screams and breathe it in and out and in and out. You see the fire of the desert and you want to feel it run through your blood. 

You’re too young to know that the crew that busted you out has made themselves marks in doing so. You’re too young to notice how you’re always running, always moving. You think it’s normal. You don’t realize that you have a target painted on your back, too.

Party’s paranoid that BLi will find them, so you run and run and run. 

And along the way, you learn. 

You learn that the desert is not kind, but it’s free. You learn how to eat out of dog cans and how to trick the mindless dracs. You learn letters and numbers, the names of every constellation in the sky. You learn how to stitch wounds and set traps. You learn how to survive.

And you learn that in the desert, there is no truth. Or rather, the truth is so vast that you can never truly accept it. Truth is ugly and broken, and there are so many pieces of it that you can’t ever see the whole thing. 

The world is so, _so_ big. And you want to see all of it.

* * *

You’re six years old when you learn how to shoot for the first time. It’s Jet who takes you out of the diner and sets a few old bottles on a craton six feet away and motions for you to shoot them.

You take his ray gun into your hand and shoot in the general direction of the bottles. You miss.

He sits down next to you so he’s at your height. He takes your hands and wraps them around the gun, shifting your fingers into the right positions. His hands are warm; they always are in the boiling desert. 

They’re steady, too, they always have been. He never had to live with the pills that BLi gave, and he never had to deal with the withdrawal. You never had to, either. When you had escaped, you were young enough that the pills hadn’t dug their hooks in you quite yet.

But you had seen Party and Kobra and Ghoul dealing with the symptoms. They would get too hot, or too cold, or they shook from the force of something none of them could see.

“Keep your eyes on the target. ,” Jet says into your ear. “You can’t shoot what you can’t see.”

His curly hair tickles your shoulder. You have the same sort of hair as him, curls that grow out instead of down. 

He shifts your feet into the right position.

You’re shaking, then, because you’ve never actually shot something when you meant to, and the shot you tried earlier had been haphazard, less of an actual trial and more of just a way to try to please Jet. You don’t like shooting. Not even when your crew shoots. You know that you have to learn, though. 

The world is too dangerous for a killjoy to live without knowing how to shoot, how to kill.

You wonder, sometimes, why they tell you to look away. They tell you to look away from their wounds, to look away from their ray guns and the buildings that they burn. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t.

You learn quickly. You always have. So you pretend to look away when they watch you, but you can still see every bit of what they don’t want you to see. You know that they just want the best for you, that they want you to be safe. 

They think you’re too young to see. To see the burns made from firefights, to see BLi buildings turned to ash. To see the bodies that rot away in the heat of the desert. They think you’re too young to know how this world ticks away, not in seconds but in fights, in blood and death and skeletons picked clean in the middle of sand dunes.

You’re not too young. 

You pull the trigger on the ray gun, and it hits a bottle. The glass explodes, and bright reflective shards shower to the ground. It’s a strange sort of beautiful, the way the light reflects off the glass, the way destruction makes a flame in your stomach.

You grin at the violent beauty, and Jet grins back.

You’re learning now, always learning about how life in the desert is. You’ve learned how to run and how to shoot, how to eat dog food from a can and enjoy it, how the desert will never be truly safe.

Sometimes you wonder if you would have needed to know this had you been living in the City. Maybe it would have been safer there, behind those white walls and their white lies, inside the regulated temperatures and regulated truths of Battery City. Maybe you could have lived a normal life there, in that perfect, clean City. You would have been normal, eventually. That fire inside you would have been snuffed out, and you would have been perfectly safe.

You would have been normal, and safe, but never free.

There would be no color. There would be no music. The coddling would have turned suffocating, and you would have drowned in the pills with white all around you.

You never really understand this, in words, until later, when you have the language to tell it. But you have a gut feeling, and you have a fire in you that wants to keep burning. And that is enough for now.

So you take aim at one of the bottles again and shoot.

For this is the flame that forges your steel.

* * *

You never realize when you use your power. It comes naturally to you, like breathing, and you never notice when your touch gives the battery of the car just a little more juice, or that Ghoul’s bombs are bigger and better than anyone else’s, and it’s not just his skill that gives them power. You never notice that people say that you are blessed by the Witch, that you will bring the City to the ground.

You do not know your power, and you will never know until the moment is right.

You are too young for this power. You are a child, and it is too big for you to hold. For too much knowledge brings too much power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Luckily for you, you don’t know.

You never notice how the Fabulous Four whisper around you sometimes, when the nights are deep, and you are far too gone to notice their words. They talk of you and your power, how you will bring salvation and the end of suffering. You will bring the City to its knees, and BLi will be ash by the time you grow old.

You’re seven years old, now, and you’re as perceptive as you’ve always been. Party is even more paranoid, and they’re always moving these days, running into the sands. They only stop by the diner to resupply, and they take indirect routes, trying not to be seen on the main roads.

It’s dark when you see them cry for the first time. It’s late, and you can’t sleep, so you crawl out of your covers and up to the roof to look at the stars. You freeze when you see Party up there, staring at the sky, their body shaking. They have a blanket wrapped tight around them, and they’re hugging their knees to their chest.

You have never seen them cry before. They are never one to cry. They rage and roar, they are the firestorm of the desert, but they have never been as you see them now, tears streaming from a trembling form, sounds stifled by a fist. You don’t move a single inch; you’re scared that they’ll see you, intruding on this moment.

But you watch Party as they tremble, and they pull the blanket closer around themselves. They seem so small like that, so young and vulnerable. The desert is so big, and they are so small. 

So you crawl back down, into your room and into your covers and try to blink away the image of them on that roof. You bury yourself in blankets and try to forget, but the image, the sound of their muffled sobs, is burned into your memory.

You realize, now, that they are not all-powerful. It is a strange thing, finding that out. You _know,_ logically, that they aren’t omniscient, but something in you has always thought that they will be here indefinitely. 

Before, you had never realized how young they were. How young all of them are. The Fabulous Four are made from a few children playing God with targets stamped on their backs, and you never knew. You still don’t know, not completely, not yet. But you have an idea of it.

You have the seed of a truth.

* * *

But sometimes, seeds lie dormant under the soil. Sometimes, they never grow. They lie in the dirt, and the outside isn’t quite right. There is not enough water for them to grow, or not the right balance of light and dark. So the seed remains hidden under dirt, waiting for the right time.

It is not time for you to find the truth yet. In fact, you will never find it. It will find you, when the stars are bright and the moon is glowing and the wind is riding in just the right direction. But not now. Not yet.

You are still seven years old, still too young to grasp what lies in front of you, teasing your senses, almost begging you to grab it. You can sense it, playing at the edges of your vision, but it is just too far away for you to take it into your hands. It is too far away, and you are not ready.

You are waiting until Party is alone, because you want to talk with them. You want to make things better. They had always said that you would save the world, and maybe you can start by saving them.

You watch as Jet and Kobra take off on Kobra’s motorbike. You don’t know where they are going, and they don’t tell you. You’re pretending to draw right now, with the pen and notebook that Party had found buried in the diner's cupboards and had given to you. They had taught you how to draw, and you always show them what you make. They would lay a careful hand over yours and teach you how to add details, how to show light and shadow in one color, guiding your fingers into the right spots. They had shown you how to create both art and pain with the same hands. 

Ghoul slides into your booth. His hair is tied away from his face, the greasy strands knotted in a ponytail that’s coming apart. He looks tired, dark fingerprints circle his eyes and cheeks are hollow. But when he smiles at you, it looks right.

BLi’s smiles had never been right. They were forced and disingenuine, masks placed on a delicate foundation, white paint covering shattered glass. The smiles in the desert are better. They have something backing them. They have _emotions_ under them, and they look _right._

“Hey, Girlie,” Ghoul says.

“Yeah?” you say back, focusing on your drawing again.

“D’you want to go get something from the car with me real quick?”

You shrug, bored, but you walk out of the diner with him.

You get to the car first. “What do you need?”

Ghoul doesn’t answer your question. Instead, he says, “You saw Party on the roof last night, didn’t you?”

You’re about to lie, to tell him that _no, you didn’t see them there, crying, trying to hold a sky too big and too heavy for them._ But he sees the truth in your hesitation.

He goes on, crouching so that he can look you in the eyes. “If you’re gonna talk with them about it…” He hesitates, and he swallows, like he’s trying to find the right words. “Just be careful, ‘kay? They’re trying their best.”

You nod, and he jerks his head back at the door. You walk back into the diner, Ghoul on your heels, spinning a wrench around in his hand.

You never realize, at first. Ghoul didn’t tell you _not_ to talk to Party. He gave you a warning, and told you to be careful, but he never told you to keep your mouth shut and not mention it. Later on, you will notice. And silently, you will thank him for that. You will always thank the killjoys for being killjoys, and for not being BLi.

You don’t talk to Party yet. It’s the middle of the day, and you figure that they’ll be more talkative at night, when exhaustion will loosen their tongue and they’ll let you in. So you spend the rest of the day trying to draw a huddled form under the stars. But it’s hard, because you only have one color. You only have one pen, and you desperately want more because _this isn’t good enough._

You wonder if it will ever be good enough. Sometimes you wonder if BLi was right all along, that maybe having no color is better than just having one. If maybe the white was to spare you the disappointment of looking down it not being enough. 

You imagine, for a moment, the drawing with more color. 

Party’s vibrant, burning red hair. The endless sky painted black and blue, tinting the desert underneath it. The stars and satellites, dotting the sky, freckles of brightness to lead the way. The sliver of a canary yellow moon, bringing the faintest glow of light.

It could be beautiful. And you find that leaching the one color you _do_ have—a black pen—would do nothing. It would make it worse. You need more color. You need every color in existence on this paper. You want it all to soak into the drawing and cover it. You want the vibrancy so badly it _hurts_.

You don’t notice Party until they’re leaning over your paper, staring at the drawing, face pale and drawn.

“You saw me?” they ask, and their voice is hollow.

This is the first time that you feel an emotion so eloquently put as _fuck, what do I do._ You don’t know what to say. You don’t know what to do. You’re frozen in your seat, staring at your drawing, incriminating you, incriminating _them_ , and you want to tell them that it’s okay, but you don’t know how to say that. 

So you just nod.

You turn around so you can look at their face. You regret it as soon as you do. They look pained and tired, and their gaze is as empty as their words had sounded. 

“Party—” you begin, in a poor attempt to soothe them.

They cut you off, jerking away. “No. Just… no. You weren’t supposed to see that.”

Then they walk stiffly away from you and into their room. They’re trying not to run, you realize. They’re trying not to run from you.

And that hurts, it really does, but you can see why they’re running. They don’t want you to see them as anything other than perfect. They don’t want to look human, even to you. Especially to you.

So you give them time, because that’s what they do when Ghoul had missed a shot when his hands were shaking too bad or when Jet couldn’t save someone. They always gave their crew space, so that’s what you do. You let them grieve for the status they lost.

It’s nearly midnight when you knock at their door. They don’t respond, but you’re worried, so you open the door anyway. They’re sitting on their bed, curled up in a ball and staring at nothing. They don’t cry, but they sit perfectly still, barely breathing.

You make your way to them, carefully, and their breath hitches. It’s the only indication that they see you. You sit next to them and lean against them. They’re shivering, you notice, just sitting there and shaking. It’s surreal, seeing them like this.

“It’s okay,” you say softly, carefully. 

“No, it’s not.”

You don’t know what to say back. So you pry their arms from around their legs, and you curl up closer to them. They’re warm, and, as you bury your head in the crook of their neck, you can smell the desert on them—sweat and dog food and the very particular smell of ray gun blasts. You don’t know what to say, but you think you can make it better.

You fall asleep like that, curled up beside them. And they’re back to their usual self the next day, blazing and burning. 

But you never learn what happened that night on the roof. Maybe it was the pressure just becoming too much for them. They are too young to lead a revolution, but they are doing it anyway. They have a family they must keep safe and a girl who is constantly in danger. BL/ind is so _big_ , the world is so big, and they are only one person. They have a past that you do not know and a future that nobody knows. There are hundreds of reasons Party Poison could have been crying on the roof that night.

You wonder if you want to know. 

The next day, you draw on the back of the picture of them on the roof. You draw a picture of them, on the day they brought you from the city, a wild grin on their face and a gun in their hand. They are holding you in the picture, the younger and smaller version of you, and the shadow of BLi rides behind them. It’s not a very good picture, but you think they’ll appreciate it.

In the margin of the paper, you write, _we are the enemy._

It’s a message. A reminder. A truth.

You slip the paper under their door that night, and they don’t mention it ever again. You will not remember drawing it. 

And you will never realize that they will have this picture in their pocket when they die.

* * *

The world ends slowly, then all at once. 

It begins with Doctor Death Defying’s broadcasts. The Doctor had always had a bit of a soft spot for Party. You learn, later on, that he’s the one who had asked Party to break you out of the City. 

The end of your world begins with his warnings, messages encoded into his usual radio broadcasts.

Party has been even more paranoid lately, and it’s their paranoia that has kept the crew alive for all these years. You’re eight now, and you’ve been running with them for four years. But you can’t run forever. At some point, you must turn around and face the threat or be run down.

Party had never been one to let themselves be cornered. So they had chosen to turn around and face the Scarecrow.

You are in the Trans Am, riding with the wind whipping your face, screaming into the open air. It had been weeks since the last attack, and maybe some part of your crew had thought they were out of the worst of it, or that BLi had finally given up, because you and the crew are doubling back to the diner to restock supplies.

There is a warning laced into Dr. Death’s broadcast, but the message comes too late. You’re stuck in Zone Four for the time being. 

So you prepare. You pack your things in the car, place your toy robot that Jet had bought and the sketchbook and pen that Party had given you into the Trans Am. Everyone else has their guns and knives and masks. None of you are ready, but it’s the best you can do.

When Show Pony rushes into the diner through the back entrance, Party tells them to go home. 

“Go back,” they say, “and don’t get dusted. Korse is on our tails, Pony, and we can’t run anymore.”

Pony snorts. “I’m not gonna abandon you. Not now.”

“Go,” Ghoul says, force behind his words. “If they catch us and we break, they’ll know where Dr. D is. Get him out of his outpost.”

It’s true, things might go Costa Rica, they might get caught, and BLi wouldn’t just kill them. They would break the Fab Four. BLi would grind every piece of information they could from the four of them, and then they would shatter the legacy they had built for themselves. BLi would eliminate them completely, take their names and black them out from the words of history. 

BLi would take what little they had built up and paint it all pretty and white. 

And you? You would be reconditioned. Your fire would be stomped out by numbing pills, and you would be turned into the perfect civilian. You would be turned into exactly what killjoys hate most and _that_ would be the final offense. 

All of them are completely aware of this. Even you, because you had to grow up too fast. 

But you must face Better Living. A person can only stumble for so long until they either fall or stand up straight.

Pony agrees, in the end, after a long talk.

“I’m not gonna wish you luck, ‘cause you’re gonna win, ‘kay Poison?” they say, patting Party on the shoulder as they secure their skates. “And I’m not gonna give Dr. D any message about any of you being ghosted, got that?”

The other four nod solemnly. You reach out and hug Pony. They stoop down and hug you back. 

They whisper in your ear, “And don’t you get dusted, either, Girl. The desert needs you.”

You nod, and say, “You too.”

And then they put on their helmet and they’re off, skating into the sunrise. Soon, you can’t see them. The others filter inside, and after a minute, you wander back into the diner as well.

The only thing you can do now is hope. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. 

* * *

But the thing about the worst is that you don’t know what it is until it happens. 

A drac holds you by your shoulders, and you’re screaming into a gag. Your voice is muffled, silenced by them. You struggle, but the drac holds you tight. 

Another is experimenting with your radio, feeling around for it. You wonder if it even hears the music that is still bleeding through the radio’s speakers.

Party is on the ground, struggling to keep their eyes open. They desperately stare at you, then at Korse, standing beside you.

You're panicking, you really are, and you’re kicking and screaming and trying to wrench yourself away from the dracs behind you. The worst isn’t Party Poison almost dying. The worst isn’t when you find that Jet Star lost an eye and that Fun Ghoul has an _X_ recut into his lips. The worst isn’t seeing Kobra Kid passed out on the ground. 

The worst is you getting caught.

Because you were _hope_ . The Fabulous Killjoys may have taken care of you, but _you_ , you are special, Girl. You don’t know that, not yet, but the Fab Four does. BL/ind knows.

The Fab Four would do anything for you. BL/ind knows that, too.

And that’s when you become bait.

You watch helplessly as Party struggles to stay conscious, fighting with the sheer intensity that they fight everything. 

You watch as Korse looks down at them and spits, “Keep running.”

The drac holding you starts dragging you away, away from Party, away from your crew, away from this home you’ve grown up in. You feel your fire flare inside of you.

No. _No._

This is not ending like this. You are not leaving the desert. You are not abandoning your crew, your _family_ , injured and bleeding into the sands. You will not leave them here.

Something sparks inside you and the drac not holding you drops its gun.

Korse quickly signals something to the one holding you, and it puts another cloth to your mouth and nose and you taste a faint whiff of bitterness. 

And the world starts to fade around you, black coloring over everything. You can’t breathe, because the more you breathe, the more the world darkens. 

Perhaps you could have used your power. But you’re not strong enough. Not yet. 

So the world fades into colorlessness. 

You drown in the static.

* * *

You wake up to blinding white all around you and a bitter taste in your mouth. You sit up, and you’re in your same clothes, the layers of color on top of each other, clashing wildly. You smile to yourself. They haven’t taken that away yet.

The room you are in is simple. A bed, a door, and four blank walls. You’re the only spot of color in the room. That makes you feel an odd type of power. 

You recognize the woman that walks in from her broadcasts. From the propaganda that coats every bit of the City, from the tattered posters that hang, ripped to shreds and spray painted over, in the desert. She is the Director.

She smooths down perfectly straight hair and refines her suit. When she looks at you, a practiced, disingenuous smile, rests on her lips. She looks perfect. Too perfect.

She walks to you and looks down. She doesn’t crouch in order for you to look her in the eye. She stares at you until you look up.

Her voice is perfectly controlled. “Do you know where the criminal Dr. Death Defying is?”

She may be the Director, but you are the Girl. You are the Missile Kid, you are the Motorbaby, you are the bomb. You were raised on sand and ray guns, arson and arsenic. You know right from wrong, and you know, better than anyone, to never, _ever,_ give Dr. Death’s location to anyone.

He has a policy of “I find you; you don’t find me”, and every killjoy in the world knows it.

So you look up and spit the words, "Fuck you."

The Director stares at you, and her eyes carry some level of disgust and her smile strained. She continues, “Do you know where the criminals Agent Cherri Cola and Show Pony are?”

You shake your head, satisfied. Those are the only words she's getting out of you. And this time, you actually don’t know. Cherri travels in and out of the walls too much to gather information and supplies. It’s safest for him that no one knows where he is, even if it means a chance for his mask to never be taken to the Witch. As for Pony, they move around the desert, carrying messages and music and whatever else they want, and you have no idea where they could be.

She goes on to ask you for locations, names, places, but every time, you shake your head, or pretend to be confused. She tells you that BLi will use “harsher methods” if you don’t tell her soon.

She never asks you about the Fab Four. She knows that they’ll come for you. She knows that she doesn’t even have to ask.

The Director doesn’t deserve your voice. She doesn’t deserve to be treated with the authority she demands. And if you can take back this little, tiny thing, then you will. 

She asks, and you don’t answer. She threatens, but you remain silent. 

She’s still smiling when she walks away, closes the door, and locks it. It’s unsettling, the BL/ind smiles. They don’t show any real emotions. Their smiles are masks. 

You suppose that when they die, their masks get taken to the Witch as well. Dead dracs don’t smile. Dead BL/ind members don’t smile. The Witch must take those masks just as easily as she takes the masks of the killjoys in the Mailbox. You wonder where she leads dead BLi members.

You take some semblance of pleasure from the thought of BLi’s masks being taken away. Because pretty soon, no one in this facility will be smiling.

* * *

The Fabulous Four come the way they always come—burning and ready for a firefight. They come in color, in music, so vibrant and real and _there_ that they set the air alight around them. They come with guns blazing, marching through the fire to the building you’re sitting in.

An alarm blares throughout the facility, and all around you, BLi prepares for an attack. You still have your vest, and, as you look around the tiny office you’re sitting in, you smile. They’ll burn BLi to the ground for you, and you know it. 

The Director stands beside you and smiles back. You wonder if she thinks that she’ll win. 

The dracs in the seats near you type on their computers, watching the outside cameras. You watch with them. They ready their guns, stand and face the windows. The Director sends a signal through some device and marches away.

You wait. They’re going to save you. All you have to do is wait.

Party shoots the dracs surrounding you, and you launch yourself at them. They hug you, burying their face in your hair, and you can smell the desert on them. The others stand guard, watching the facility around them.

You stand and march out of the office, the Fab Four at your back. They got in; now it’s time to get out. You walk through white hallways, watching the world around you carefully. Giant posters of killjoys who were ghosted or masked hang on the walls, large Xs painted over their faces.

 _They’re trophies for Scarecrows,_ you think, and part of you wants to tear them down.

You get to the lobby of the building when the dracs come. Dozens, led by Korse, filter in through the elevators behind you. 

Party hears them first. They pivot, and the rest follow.

They circle around, shooting as many dracs as they can, trying to keep the fire off of you. They kill any of the white forms that get near you. You cover your ears, but the sounds of laser fire and fallen bodies fill them anyway. 

You want to close your eyes, but you can’t. 

You want to move, but you _can’t_.

When Party gets cornered by Korse, you can’t run to them. When Korse pushes his gun under Party’s throat, you can’t save them. When he pulls the trigger and fills Party’s head with plasma, you can’t move. You watch helplessly as they sink to the ground, and you _scream_.

You scream, and you shut your eyes, but the world around you is still loud and everything is still burning and Party Poison is still _dead._

Party Poison is dead. Party, the one who had held your hand as they escaped from the City, the one who had forced the world to bow to them, the one who had blazed, their fire as bright as their hair. 

You don’t notice when Kobra runs after their body, shooting at Korse and getting gunned down in the process. 

Jet and Ghoul lock eyes and run towards you. They motion for you to run, and you do, because it’s all you can do. You couldn’t save Party or Kobra, but maybe Jet and Ghoul will make it out alive.

Ghoul closes the glass door in front of him. 

You start to run back. Ghoul can’t die. Not him too.

He mouths, _“Go!”_ to Jet, and turns to face the dracs. 

Jet drags you away from the door, and you don’t see Ghoul fall.

The two of you run to the Trans Am, only for Jet to be shot in the heart and fall on the roof of the car.

For a moment, you just stand there, staring at the scene in front of you. You’re untethered, trapped between the jump and the landing, and it feels like none of them could actually be dead, that they’ll get up at any instance, and grab your hand, warmth coursing through them. They’ll bring you into the backseat of the car, and you’ll escape the City, music blasting, just like you did four years ago. They can’t be dead. They _can’t_.

You land back in reality as a van pulls up and Show Pony steps out. They survey the scene, helmet still on, and cover you as you step towards the van. Dr. D takes you by the waist and pulls you inside, and Pony takes one more shot at the BLi agents and gets into the van, closing the door behind them.

DJ Hot Chimp is sitting in the driver’s seat, and she pumps the gas, getting you out of the City. BLi doesn’t give chase. They’ve already gotten what they wanted.

The van is silent as you pull out of Battery City.

Party Poison is dead. 

Kobra Kid is dead. 

Jet Star is dead.

Fun Ghoul is dead.

The Fabulous Four are _gone_ , and in a single night, your world has ended.

But the molten metal that builds you up—being raised on stars and sand and music and art—has cooled. Your childhood is gone, but there’s something where that used to be. 

A bomb is taking shape inside you. 

* * *

The van finally stops at one of Doctor Death Defying’s outposts. It’s in Zone One, but almost no one knows where it is. 

You’ve been silent the entire ride. None of them have tried to talk to you. Dr. Death has been staring at the same page of a notebook, trying to write a eulogy, for an hour. Show Pony is holding you, keeping their arms tucked around you. DJ Hot Chimp is in the front seat, driving into the dark desert. None of them say a word, though Hot Chimp and Pony look back occasionally to check for tails.

You had come out of the entrance that the Fabulous Four created. 

You stare at the wall of the van as it pulls to a stop. Dr. D closes his notebook. Pony leads you out by the shoulders, nodding to Hot Chimp in thanks.

“We owe you one,” the Doctor says.

“No need,” Hot Chimp says back. “The Fab Four have saved my ass more times than I can remember.”

Dr. D doesn’t argue; he just pats Hot Chimp’s shoulder and rolls out of the van.

You walk into the WKIL station and don’t look back. You don’t even notice when Hot Chimp drives away. You aren’t holding on to anything. You had left your toy robot and notebook in the Trans Am. You have nothing now.

Your family is gone.

* * *

A week later, you talk to Show Pony. They’re back to sending messages, and the Doctor is back on the radio. You suppose that you should be moving on as well. 

The Doctor had updated the desert and radioed out a eulogy, but it’s spun for his own agenda. You realize this as you read over the lines. 

Dr. D had tried to spin this as a tragic victory. The main idea of it had been: _The Fabulous Four are dead, but the Girl is alive and kicking. The Girl’s special. She’ll save us all._

You hate him, a bit, for that. You hate him for taking the deaths of your family and using them as a weapon. You hate him for trying to piece together the broken shards of their memory and creating his own message from it. You hate him for turning them into martyrs and you into a hero. 

But you suppose everyone in the desert has their own agenda.

That’s the second bit of truth you find. Even those closest to the Fab Four had tried to profit from their deaths. Even the most revered, even the voices of the desert have their own goals.

You remember, long ago, that Party had never trusted Dr. D completely. They had told you, once, that the Doctor would stab you in the back for a leg up on BLi. That the only reason he was helping them was that the Fab Four had had a chance against BL/ind.

When Pony skates into the station, you speak to them for the first time. It’s the first time you’re talking to anyone after the night your family had died.

“Where are their masks?” you ask.

Pony takes off their helmet and shakes greasy hair from their face. “The diner, I think. I can take you later.”

You nod and walk to the small room the Doctor gave you.

You’re no longer dressed in your vest and old Japanese clothing. It doesn’t feel right anymore, and now they smell too clean, too much like that Better Living building. Instead, you take an old leather jacket you find in Dr. D’s closet, tough, brown pants, a dark shirt, and combat boots. 

You aren’t wearing killjoy colors anymore; you don’t have the bright red and blue draped across you, but you aren't wearing BLi colors either. You’re not spitting in the face of BL/ind anymore, but you still hate them.

You don’t know how long the Doctor is going to let you stay here. You don’t know how long you want to stay here. You don’t know what you’re going to do.

Right now, you can only think about the future in the short term. Get their masks and put them in the mailbox. Grab anything left of theirs in the diner. Find what you can to survive the night.

The most future you can think of is staying alive.

* * *

The diner is a mess. Some waveheads had gone through the stuff there when they had heard about the Fab Four getting dusted, and now everything is in the wrong place. 

You find Ghoul’s mask under his bed. He must have predicted what would happen and hidden it there. 

You find Kobra’s in a locked drawer that you pick open. His GOOD LUCK helmet is gone, but you thank the Witch that you found his mask.

Jet’s helmet is stuffed in your room, under a pile of trash.

You can’t find anything of Party’s.

You realize, then, that none of them had taken their masks. They all had known that they would die. And yet they had still come. You sink down into your old bed, and something deep in your stomach _hurts._ Twists with a strange tug, like you’re a towel and someone is trying to squeeze even more tears from you.

They had walked into fire to save you. They had known. They _knew_ that they would die for you, and they had walked into Battery City anyway. 

You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve their blood, you don’t deserve their empty masks, you don’t deserve their deaths. They’re gone, and you’re still here, and you have _nothing left._

You take an old backpack of yours and put Kobra’s and Ghoul’s masks in it, along with some of your own stuff—a few bottles of water, some PowerPup, and a couple batteries. You carry Jet’s helmet outside.

Pony nods at you. “Got everything?” they ask.

“Yeah,” you mutter. 

You don’t want to be here anymore. You don’t want to see the diner, see the chipped paint of graffiti that Party had drawn, the _FUCK YOU_ that Ghoul had charred into the wall with his ray gun, the notches that Kobra had carved into the tables, the incomplete repairs that Jet had tried so hard to finish. You don’t want to see shades of them all around you, their ghosts haunting you and their shadows stretching over you. 

Pony puts a hand on your shoulder, and you try not to flinch at the touch. “Come on,” they say. “Let’s get to the Mailbox before dark.”

* * *

Dead flowers litter the ground around the Mailbox. They’re dried from the desert sun, but you can see that some of them are painted as red as Party’s hair. They’re tributes, you realize.

You’re not the only one mourning what is lost.

You suppose that Dr. D was partly trying to keep morale up, keep the desert from falling apart. By saying that you are still alive, he sets up a placeholder where the Fab Four used to be. They were the hope of the desert, but now that they’re gone, _you’re_ the hope. Logically, it’s a good idea, but you still hate him, a bit, for that.

Pony is standing a few yards off, keeping watch but giving you privacy. They’re twirling their ray gun around one of their fingers, and they carefully watch the desert for movement. You sit in the sands and unzip your backpack.

You take out Ghoul’s mask first. It’s rubbery and latex, with some sort of breathing device inside for when BLi would pump chemicals into the desert air. You hold his mask and you remember him.

You remember him, and his bombs, the way he would tie his greasy, black hair away from his face, the way his hands would only be steady when he made bombs, the way he would smirk and wink at the dracs he ghosted. You think of him, turning around to hold back the dracs, keeping them away just long enough for you to survive.

A black raven lands on top of the Mailbox, calling an eerie song into the silent air. 

You slip the mask into the Mailbox. “Leave him to rest,” you pray to the Witch. “Walk him home. He deserves it.”

You take Kobra’s red mask from your bag next. You think of him, vicious and sly, asking the questions you don’t want to hear but have to, being the hard truth where anyone else would be the kind lie.

You slip it into the Mailbox as well. “Take care of him,” you say.

You lift Jet’s helmet and put it on top of the Mailbox. You remember Jet, Jet with his steady hands guiding yours, showing you how to shoot, how to patch wounds. Jet, who was raised in the desert, telling you the names of the stars, showing you how to find fallen satellites, teaching you which plants and animals are safe to hunt and eat and which should be left alone.

“Phoenix Witch, take care of all of them. Okay?” you ask Her.

The raven on top of the Mailbox caws once and flies away.

You smile bitterly to yourself. At least you have a goal now. You have a place to go, a task to finish. You’re going to find Party Poison’s mask and lay them to rest. Then you’re going to burn BLi to the ground, no matter what they throw against you. They took everything from you. Now it’s time to take everything from them.

You zip up your backpack and put it on. You walk to Show Pony, and they reach down, brushing tears you didn’t know that you had shed from your cheeks.

“You okay, Girl?” they say softly.

Your voice is trembling when you speak. “I’m going to burn them all to the _fucking_ ground.”

You and Pony travel back to the station in silence.

* * *

You stay with Doctor Death Defying for two years.

He likes you, and you’ve always learned quickly. You learn every song, every record. You learn how to keep BLi off of your radio waves, and you learn how to weave words so that the desert will listen to you. You learn how to make people hear you, how to tell if information is credible, and you learn what to tell the desert.

But you learn more than how to DJ. You learn history. You learn about the past, about the world before the Analog Wars. You learn about a world unsaturated by pollution, where no one held a ray gun, a world with trees twenty times taller than you and ice caps on each end of the globe. You learn about a world where people who had been different weren’t shot or given pills. You learn about a world where art was created for art’s sake, not as the spit in the face of BLi that it is now. You learn about the world that had ended, and how BLi had built itself from the ashes and dust of the burned and broken.

Dr. D teaches you about the wars, too. The world before the wars had been more accepting, but it had been unstable. He never tells you what side he was on, but you know that he fought in them and lost his legs to them. He tells you that the world had been like a glass object balanced on the point of a sword. A single push had brought it to pieces it is in now.

You suppose it is a question, a debate whether security or freedom should be valued more. You still don’t know which you would pick.

When you leave, you’re only ten years old. 

You’re young, far too young to wander through the deserts alone, but you can’t stay in the Doctor’s station anymore. You can’t stay in the walls covered in scraps of paper and fabric, hearing lies about you and your future. You love the Doctor for teaching and guiding you for so long, but you can never take it when he talks about a future that you will never bring.

You love him, but you still hate him for using death and memory as a weapon. 

So you decide to leave.

Dr. D doesn’t try to stop you. Instead, he tells you to keep your boots tight and to come to him if you ever get stuck in something you can’t get out of.

Pony tries to convince you to stay, but you’re stubborn, so in the end, they give you some extra PowerPup, some carbons, and a waterskin. Dr. D gives you a ray gun, along with some batteries. 

“You know how to shoot, right?” he asks you.

You nod. You have terrible aim, and every time you shoot, you think of the lobby of the BLi building, the sounds of laserfire layering on top of bodies falling, Party’s dead eyes, your screams. You don’t say any of that though. Instead, you take the white gun from his hands and tuck it into a sheath. You don’t have any plans of using it, but you suppose it’s better to be prepared.

Pony gives you a portable radio, along with their personal signal, and tells you to radio in every once in a while.

Dr. D tells you to wait until sunset, when it’s easier to get around. You agree and pack your supplies.

You sit on the mattress he had given you and stare at the wall, you stare at the pieces of fabric and old newspapers and art that layer each other. They cover every wall, even the ceiling. They remind you too much of the diner’s walls, covered in spray paint and ray gun burns, alive with art. 

You wonder where they would have thought you would end up. Whether they thought you were special, just like everyone else seems to. Is that why they had chosen to take you from the City? You wish that you could ask them.

A picture pinned on the wall catches your eye, and you stand up. You take it off and study it. It’s a picture of a woman, with brown hair that lies in curly tangles like yours. The picture is fuzzy, and you can’t make out any details, but you can see her smiling. She’s laughing, and she has a drink in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

You hear the door creak open behind you and Dr. D rolls into the room.

You feel his stare on you.

“She was a leader,” he says. “She saved my life, you know.”

“In the Analog Wars?” you ask.

“Yeah.” He is quiet for a moment, as if trapped in a memory. 

You turn and hand him the polaroid. He shakes his head.

“Keep it,” he says, a sad smile resting on his lips. His voice still sounds like it’s in the past. “She was hellfire. She fought for the future.”

“Well, her future didn’t come.”

He smiles wider, like he knows something, but you can’t place it.

He starts to roll away, back to his part of the station. Then he stops. “I never lie on my broadcasts, Motorbaby. I’ve got my thoughts on everything that happens in this desert, but I don’t lie. _You_ are the hope that the original killjoys fought so hard for, the hope that the Fab Four died for. So don’t get ghosted out there.”

You don’t know what to say to that.

He rolls away, and you turn to your bag. You fold the polaroid so that you can’t see the woman, and you tuck it into the back pocket of your backpack.

You take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

You’re scared. Never in your life have you been alone, truly alone. You’ve always had someone to watch your back. But this is it, you suppose. 

* * *

The sun burns the sands red and orange, like fire, by the time you leave. The sky is burnt as well, but odd colors spring up from the smoke and radiation that hangs perpetually over the desert. 

You don’t say goodbye, and they don’t wish you good luck. You just take your backpack and your radio and you start walking in a random direction. You know the desert like the back of your hand, but you don’t know where to start when it comes to finding Party’s mask. It could be anywhere. 

So you wander.

You wander, alone, through the desert, bouncing from Zone to Zone, avoiding anything even slightly BLi. It’s been two years, but they still try to trace your radio waves. They’re still trying to find you. 

You wonder what they’ll do if they do get to you. Would they kill you? You don’t know. You don’t know why they think you’re special, why the desert worships you and BL/ind wastes resources trying to track you down. You have yet to find that truth.

So you walk through the endless desert, avoiding main roads. You bolt at any sign of white, but you avoid other ‘joys as well. They expect too much from you. 

You take to drawing in the notebook you stole from Dr. D’s station. The notebook is simple, just an old spiral-bound mass of lined paper from before the Analog Wars. It has snippets of lines you recognize from Dr. Death’s speeches, written in a hasty scribble, but it’s mostly empty. You had also taken a few of his pens with you. You draw in that book a lot, but you try to save the paper, save the pens, because they’re the only ones you have.

Paper is too expensive to waste. It takes so much _work_ to make, and so many materials that the only paper left is either too expensive for anyone to buy or old treasures from before the Wars. So this is all you have.

One notebook and a few pens in this endless desert.

* * *

The first time you walk into Tommy Chow Mein’s store by yourself, he stares at you the whole time. You’re in Zone Three, and you had just run out of thread the night before. 

You hadn’t been in this store for three years. The last time you had been here, the Fabulous Four were still alive. You never went with Show Pony when they had gone out for supply runs. For the last few months, you were able to lift things from BLi body bags or find them out in the desert. 

You haven’t seen Tommy in three years, but he still looks the same. The same scars, the same suit, the same smirk as he charges too many carbons to the two ‘joys buying PowerPup. 

Unlike him, you don’t look the same. You’re still short for your age, but your hair grows down your back in a tangled mess, reaching your shoulders. You have new scars and new callouses. But that’s not what has changed. You're older now, you’re stronger now, and you have more of a mind for the desert. You have more of a mind for revenge, too.

It’s clear that he still recognizes you, though. 

You take a container of needles and a spool of thread from the wall of his shop and walk to the register.

He takes them from your hands, examines them, and smirks at you. “So you _are_ still here. Seems Dr. D doesn’t talk out of his ass all the time.”

You keep your face blank. “How many carbons?”

He rolls his eyes and says, “Ten.”

You say, “I’m not paying _ten carbons_ for some thread and needles. Five.”

“Girlie, I gotta make a profit. Nine.”

You snarl at him. “Six.”

His answering smile is too sharp. “Kitty’s got claws. Eight. That’s my final offer.”

You snatch the container of needles and spool from him and hand over the carbons.

As you put them into your backpack, Tommy says softly, somewhere between a question and a statement, “The four of ‘em… they died.” 

You feel a pang of something in your chest.

“I know they did,” you snap. “And so do you.”

“But they got you out.”

Heat burns the back of your eyes. “Yeah.”

He turns away from you, but not before you see his hands shaking.

You pick up your bag and start to walk out of the store, feeling like you’re choking on _something_ , you don’t know what, but there’s a lump in your throat and you feel like you can’t breathe.

But before you can walk through the door, Tommy says, “I’m sorry ‘bout them.”

You nod and mutter, “So am I.”

You walk out of the store before your tears have a chance to fall.

* * *

Desert nights are quiet. Out in the Zones, when there’s nothing but sand and sky and ruin around you, where the stars and satellites shine through the radiation, there’s this sense of quiet. It feels blanketed on, and it seems to muffle your own noise. There’s a feeling of peace that comes from that. 

You wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to live in the City. There wouldn’t be loss there, there wouldn’t be this void where your family used to be. Everything would be cold and clinical, and there would be no pain because there would be no true emotion. All of it would be doused in numbness, your feelings would be perfect, straight, reasonable lines, not jagged scribbles. They would be feeling easily described by words like _anger, happiness, sadness,_ not the indescribable feelings that need some sort of strange and inane metaphor to explain. It would be simple, and clean, and easy.

Sometimes, you want it to be that easy. You want the noise in your head to quiet. You want the feelings to bleed away from you. You just want it all to stop _hurting_ so much. 

You’re out in Zone One, too close to the wall. You’re hidden in a natural cave, but it’s still dangerous being here.

You don’t know why you’re here. It’s been about a year since you left Dr. D’s place. You could find the station here; you know the Zones better than you know yourself. But you prefer staying here, in this tiny cave, radio playing quietly beside you.

It’s always on, and you like to think of it as lucky. Witch-blessed. It always seems to find the right waves and never runs out of batteries. Maybe that had been why Pony had given it to you.

You still haven’t fired your ray gun. It’s stuffed in your waistband, and sometimes your hand drifts to it when you’re on edge, and sometimes when you’re _really_ on edge, you spin it in your hands or you practice drawing it as quickly as you can. You haven’t fired it, but you know it’s only a matter of time.

BLi still combs the desert looking for killjoys, looking for _you_ , and any day now, they could find you. You should be ready. 

But you’re not. It reminds you too much of them.

So you run, and you hide. Any sign of white, and you bolt for some hole in the ground, hide behind some desecrated ruin, take any cover you can. You keep moving and you run like Party used to, as if staying in the same place for too long will kill you. Realistically, it will.

So why are you staring at the wall around Battery City, practically at BL/ind’s doorstep?

Good question. 

You can’t see the stars from here. The radiation hangs above Zone One the most, and clears along the way to Zone Six. You can still feel the quiet of the dark desert, but something hovers near it. A knowledge that this quiet, this peace, is going to end, that the world _will_ collapse around you and you know it.

Trepidation.

Anticipation.

The world will end and you know it will.

And there’s nothing you can do about it.

* * *

Newsie and Hot Chimp find you in the middle of a clap. When the dracs finally catch up to you in Zone Four, you duck into an abandoned gas station. The shelves are bare, picked clean, and debris is scattered all over the floor. The walls are painted over with designs. You see Party’s pill painted on one wall.

You hide behind the counter, praying to the Witch that there aren’t Scarecrows in that white van. You’re alone in this, with no backup. You take out your ray gun, still unpainted and unused. Grime coats the barrel and the trigger, dulling the white.

You check how many draculoids wait outside for orders. 

Shit. Five dracs, no Crows or exterminators, but still. You don’t have a crew, and you don’t have anyone to watch your back. You’re stuck here, and you’ve got no way out, nowhere to run.

You take off your backpack and take inventory. Four batteries, a pocket knife, your ray gun, and enough medical supplies to patch a few bad wounds. 

You check the dracs again. They fan out, and one runs behind the station. 

You turn down the volume of your radio and try to find the right frequency. You trust this thing; it’s never failed you. Your fingers tremble as you send out a call for help, hoping that _someone_ catches your radio waves.

You wrap your hands around your gun. They’re sweating and shaking with the same nerves you had as a five-year-old, and they’re going to throw your aim.

You take a breath. Let it out. Try to calm the trembling.

The drac is an easy target over the counter. You shift your feet and exhale slowly, and before you can talk yourself into backing down and trying to run, you get to your feet and shoot. The blast is deafening, a high-pitched whine that tears through your ears. You duck back behind the counter before it can see you. Before you can see if the shot hit.

Behind you, the drac you missed fires a hole in the wall where your head was a second ago. You struggle to catch your breath at the sight.

You concentrate, bringing your mind back to Jet’s fingers moving yours, his voice in your ear. _You can’t shoot what you can’t see._

You crawl to the side of the counter and stand. Take aim and fire.

It hits the drac square in the back. As it collapses, three more turn to you and fire back. A shot of plasma flies so close to you that the heat of it singes your hair, and you flinch, ducking behind your cover half a second later.

One down. Four to go, one that’s somewhere behind you. But you need to deal with these three first. 

You check the charges of your gun. Still full. It’s strange, but you don’t dwell on it. You have more important problems.

When they pause to reload, you take aim and shoot at another drac. Three shots drive into its body, the light of them blinding as it crumples to the ground. The two in front of you edge closer, steps sure and guns held high. They know they have you cornered. 

You lose all thought of where to aim, or how to calm your breathing. Instead, you fire shot after shot at the white forms, each one more desperate and farther away from their targets.

You hear the van before you see it. The sounds of a roaring engine and heavy music echo through the empty ruins of the gas station, loud and brash and unapologetic. This isn’t BLi. 

DJ Hot Chimp and NewsaGoGo climb out of their spray-painted van, ray guns already blazing. You close your eyes against the explosions of white, and after the dracs have fallen, you climb out of the ruin behind the counter.

As soon as you take a step, something behind you shatters. You turn to face the drac, back door broken at its feet, and your heart leaps into your throat as it raises its gun and _shoots_.

The pain explodes across your shoulder. Your knees collapse from under you, and you throw one arm below you to cushion the fall. You feel the blood run down your fingers before you see it, red spilling onto the ground. You’re swaying, but at least you’re still awake.

Newsie runs to you, and Hot Chimp takes the drac down with one shot to the stomach. She strides up to it and fires another bolt into its head for good measure. “And stay down, motherfucker.”

Newsie kneels next to you. “Hey,” you say in greeting. “Thanks for the save.”

Hot Chimp ignores you, and searches through the dracs pockets, looking for anything of good enough quality to steal. 

Newsie says, “Yeah. Let me see the wound.”

You’re too tired to protest, so you peel off your jacket and rip your shirt to let her have access to the burn. She takes out a roll of bandages and wraps your shoulder. 

“Keep pressure on it,” she says to you. She turns to Hot Chimp. “C’mon, let’s get goin’ before the cleanup crew gets here.”

They walk you to the van and you climb in.

The van is as colorful inside as it is on the outside. Colorful maps of the Zones, of Battery City, of lands you don’t know are tacked onto the walls. Paintings and polaroids are taped between maps, and bits of string and colored wood frames any empty spaces. Along one wall is a mess of wires and knobs, all connecting to a microphone on a table. Three computers, each showing different images, sit behind the mic. A wooden crate that doubles as a chair stands near the set. You recognize some knobs and switches from Dr. D’s station, but each DJ uses different waves, so you don’t know what some of them mean.

Hot Chimp starts the van, driving away from the station. Newsie sits you down on the crate, and she takes some med supplies from a pack. She pours alcohol into a rag and presses it into your wound.

You flinch at the burn, and your jaw clenches. 

“Sorry,” she says.

You nod and let her disinfect the wound. 

“So where’ve you been?” Hot Chimp asks from the front seat.

You shrug with your uninjured shoulder. “Out. ‘M looking for Party’s mask.”

Newsie takes out a needle and thread. “Any luck?”

You shake your head. 

She threads the needle carefully. “You been out on your own all this time?”

You shake your head again. “I ran with Dr. D for a while.”

She nods sympathetically, and she starts stitching your wound back together. You hiss at the sting of the needle. 

Newsie says, “No crew?”

“No crew.”

She nods. She understands. Most people do. A crew is a family, and one can’t be easily replaced by another. 

“Stay with us for a little while,” Newsie says. “Just until you’re back on your feet.”

You start to protest. “Newsie—”

Hot Chimp cuts you off. “Just stay for a few days. That wound ain’t gonna heal with the med supplies you have. Look, we can put out word about Poison’s mask too if you want.”

You sigh. “Fine. A few days, that’s it.”

* * *

It’s easy staying with them. They’re not like Dr. D; they don’t expect you to be a hero, they don’t prophesize about your future. They don’t care about how supposedly special or extraordinary you are. They leave you alone, and they don’t ask you hard questions. You respect their space and they respect yours.

So a few days turns to a few weeks, and a few weeks turns into a few months, until you’re thirteen and you’ve spent half a year on the road with them.

Hot Chimp puts out a call for Party’s mask, but she really can’t do much more than that. 

It’s a cool morning, and you’re sitting outside the van, trying to draw Kobra from memory. You like to go out in the early mornings and draw, watch the sunrise before it becomes all-encompassing, watch it come to power before it explodes with it.

You can almost feel Party’s hands positioning yours, in the same way you feel Jet’s hands when you shoot or Ghoul’s when you try to build bombs out of scrap. You sketch Kobra’s eyes, but when you look at what’s on the paper, it isn’t right.

You try again, desperately, this time with straighter lines and a more set brow, but it still isn’t what you want. So you erase and try again, and again and again and again. But it never comes out how you want it to. It’s not _Kobra_ . It’s some copy of Kobra, like the signs that BLi had put up back in the day, guessing what the Fab Four’s faces had looked like. It’s close enough to see who he is, but it isn’t _right_.

In the end, you erase his whole face and just draw his GOOD LUCK helmet. But you can still see the eraser marks and the faded, failed lines. 

You turn the page and decide to try again with Ghoul. Surely you can draw him. Ghoul, with his dark, oily hair, his constant half-smile, the smirk you could hear in his voice. You have to be able to draw him.

But you can’t. It doesn’t come out quite right either, it doesn’t click in the way it used to.

So you try with Party. Then with Jet. Then you try again with Kobra. You draw all of them, over and over again, and none of the drawings are right. You waste precious pages of your notebook in failed attempts to rekindle lost memories.

You can’t accept it. You just can’t. You can’t accept that they are gone from the world _and_ from the remnants of memory you still hold. You can’t accept that you’re forgetting them, that they are rocks in the river that is your memory, and, little by little, flashes of them, made of dust and dirt and tiny pebbles, are being washed away, taken downstream into the sea, where you’ll never see them again.

How could you just forget them? _How could you?_

You don’t notice that you’re crying until your tears hit the paper, and you jerk the notebook away from yourself. 

But you can’t help but wonder what happens when you don’t remember them at all. What happens when not only their faces, but their voices, their shadows, their laughter, their hands holding your hands and their fingers laced through your fingers, what happens when all of that is taken downstream? What happens when you are left truly alone, when you have nothing from them but stories you don’t remember living? 

No. _No._ You _can’t_ be forgetting them. They saved you from the City, they raised you on sand and sun and music, they made you who you are, and you are _forgetting_ them. Another piece of them is going to the Witch. 

You can feel the memories slipping from your hands. It’s like holding sand, knowing some grains are slipping through the cracks, but you don’t realize how much. You think you still have a handful of sand, but by the time you try to find a grain, the exact color of Party’s eyes or the exact pitch of Ghoul’s laughter, you can’t find it. It’s gone, and it can’t ever be replaced, and _you_ lost it.

To die in the eyes of the desert is to be forgotten.

You are killing the Fabulous Killjoys all over again, and _you can’t stop_.

* * *

You leave without saying goodbye. It’s too easy staying with them, too easy to blend into the background, to smile at their jokes and run with them. It’s too easy to pretend that you’re here out of love and not pity, that your stay was because they want you and not because the Fab Four’s shadow stretches over you. 

So you write them a note and rip it out of your notebook. 

_I’ll find you when the sun turns black. Don’t follow me._

It’s not a goodbye, not really. It’s an _I’ll see you later._ A _thank you._

You pack your things and leave the note on Hot Chimp’s equipment, where you know she’ll see it. You leave in the middle of the night and hope they don’t mourn your lost company.

And, for another year, you begin to follow rumors. You blend into the background of wild Zone parties, meet with crews and duos and triads, going where word of Party’s mask takes you. You write down dates and locations in your notebook, let whispers whisk you into the tiniest corners and the furthest reaches of the Zones. 

You don’t mind the traveling. The desert looks the same anywhere you go, but you’ve lived here for years. You can tell by the texture of the sand what Zone you’re in. 

Searching gives you something to do. A mission, a goal. Something to keep you walking, keep you fighting. 

Keep running.

Ha. It’s all you can do now.

* * *

When you see Korse for the first time in six years, your first instinct is to try to shoot him. 

You’re in Zone Two, following whispers of a yellow mask on some young and foolish killjoy looking to be the next Party Poison. You don’t find the mask, but you see _him_.

You see Korse in flashes. A grey suit. A bald head. A perfectly white gun. 

His smirk, as he had held you, forcing you to look, to look as he ripped out Jet’s eye, as he slashed an _X_ into Ghoul’s mouth, as he left your crew bruised and broken, as he snarled for them to run, run, _run._ There is something about fear that makes it burn itself deeper into your brain than love, deeper than the details of the Fabulous Killjoys, deeper than all the little things you’ve already forgotten. Fear is a knife wound in your mind, and you can still feel every inch of the scar it creates. It has scabbed over, peeled, scarred, but the memory lingers.

You remember every detail of Korse, and you want to _burn_ every piece of him.

He hasn’t seen you yet. He walks around the disco you’re stalking outside. You had been waiting outside, watching for a certain yellow mask. But he’s here, he’s _here_ , and you don’t know what for, but you have a chance.

So you take aim. 

And he turns, locks eyes with you. In one fluid movement, he pulls out his gun and shoots. You scramble out of the way. The sand burns black where your head was half a second ago. 

He doesn’t try again. He just _looks_ at you, and you look back, panting. You recognize something in his gaze. It’s the same thing that you had seen in Party’s eyes all that time ago, when you had taken their hand and walked out of the City. Something burns there. 

Something _burns_.

It takes you a moment to see it. Emotion. Korse, the scourge of the desert, the Scarecrow that had burned the Fabulous Killjoys to ash, the shadow that hangs over every killjoy _feels something._

You want to laugh. Something turned him. Something broke through his fog of pills, and something made BLi’s greatest asset into their enemy. Ironic, isn’t it?

You don’t laugh, and you don’t smile at him as you stand. He still hurt you, he still hurt _them_ , he still took everything from you and tore it all to pieces. But you’ve learned a lot from watching the desert, you’ve seen a lot, and you know so much. You learn that in the end it’s not the dracs that killed your family. It’s not even the Scarecrows. It’s Better Living Industries.

Killing one Crow will not do anything. They’ll just replace it with another. 

Crows and dracs and exterminators, they’re _you_. They’re what you could have been, if you were raised in that City. They have potential.

And this one has fire.

So, deliberately, you turn your back and walk away. 

You don’t try to shoot him again. And you trust him to not shoot you.

It’s not that you forgive him. It isn’t that you could ever forgive him, or give him a chance when it comes to you, but you want to see where this goes. The scar is still there, the memories hide beneath that scar. 

But you’re old enough to understand that if _Korse_ of all people has emotions, it can be very, _very_ dangerous to BLi. Party used to talk badly at times of Dr. D prioritizing getting a leg up on Better Living over lives lost, but now you’re doing that, too. 

_It’s worth it,_ you think. _Every life is worth the destruction of BLi._

Korse will kill more ‘joys. He will still haunt the desert; he had still killed the Fab Four. But if he, someone deep in the inner workings of BL/ind, acts on his emotions, a spark can flare. 

You would do anything for that spark. Anything to watch BLi burn. Even this.

Battles are fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out. You are on the outside, but he is on the inside. Every war requires sacrifices. \

So you keep walking and don’t look back.

* * *

The first company that sticks with you is a cat. Everyone else had left you, or you had left them, but the cat always sticks with you. 

You find it in an old motel on the border between Zones Five and Six. The motel is one of your safe spots. It had been an old spot of the Fab Four’s, but only you know about it now. It’s small, out of the way, just three small, poorly lit rooms next to each other, stocked with food and water and ammunition. 

It’s been a hard week. You have had dracs on your tail lately, and you’re low on supplies. You had finally lost them yesterday somewhere in Zone 4, and you had been able to escape into this safehouse. Every few months, they send out a group of dracs, sometimes with a Scarecrow, and try to catch you. They never can.

It’s strange. BLi used to have Scarecrows tailing you _everywhere_ , but they’ve lightened up. They’re focusing on someone else now.

You hear that they’re focusing on Val Velocity. The name is whispered in cold desert nights, shouted into the sky, graffitied on walls. 

_Val Velocity will take down BLi._

You brush it off. He‘s just some new ‘joy that the desert will give up hope about a few years down the line. From what you’ve heard, he’s young, impulsive, and acts like he’s better than everyone. He crashes BLi parties, but he hasn’t drawn their complete attention. Not yet.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. 

You know how it goes. Some new killjoy becomes the “hope of the desert”, and everyone has absolute faith that they’ll finally, _finally_ burn BLi to the ground, only for them to burn themselves away instead, either ending up six feet under or hidden in some distant corner of the Zones, faded into obscurity. 

It’s just another bit of truth you’ve found in all of these years of running. The desert needs hope in the way it needs water, but it’s like every cup is just a little bit poisoned. A sip of hope is fine, safe, but whenever the desert has faith in whatever the new piece of hope is, it chokes itself on the poison. 

That happened to the Fabulous Four. That happened to you.

You’re hiding in the motel, restocking your food and water. It’s dingy and dark, with lights that never completely work and running water that never works. But it has a stock of supplies under the beds. 

You never have to restock batteries; they never seem to run out. You don’t know why, but you don’t dwell on it. You can’t dwell on much when your life is always on the line. To you, batteries are just one less supply that you have to worry about.

You can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous, and if BLi finds this place, it’s another hideout you won’t be able to run to when things get dicey. 

The radio runs in the background, but you tune it out. You haven’t talked with Dr. D in years. Sometimes you run with Pony for protection, and you keep in touch, but you don’t have any constant backup. As for Cherri, you’ve seen him around, but you don’t talk. It feels like it’s been too long to talk with any of them, to run with any of them. 

And they always remind you of what you’ve lost.

In the corner of your vision, you see a shadow shift behind you, and you grapple for your gun. You spin in one movement and take aim at its general direction. The lights flicker around you. You squint, trying to make out the figure.

“Who’s there?” you ask, voice shaking.

Part of the shadow separates, moving with a liquid grace, and a midnight colored cat steps out. You gape, lowering your gun slowly. You’ve never seen an animal. Never seen any _real_ animals, anyway. The most you get is the picture of a dog on PowerPup cans. You put down your gun, and step towards it carefully. 

You crouch down and reach a hand to the cat. Look into its green eyes and smile softly.

You remember now, strangely, Party’s hand in yours, leading you out of the City for the first time. Bringing you home. Creating a home for you.

“Hey,” you whisper. Your voice rasps, but the cat’s ears perk at it. 

The cat steps towards you, and you run a finger over its head. Its fur is soft and silky, a texture you’ve never felt before. It lifts its head and steps into your hand, purring. 

You pack the rest of your things. You lift the cat in your arms, and it rubs itself against your chest. You laugh, for the first time in a long while. It climbs onto your shoulders, the weight strangely familiar.

You smile and walk out of the motel.

 _Maybe I won’t be so alone after all_ , you think.

* * *

You don’t name the cat. You don’t name it for the same reason that you don’t name yourself. You haven’t found one that fits yet. Yeah, you’re Missile Kid and Motorbaby and a hundred other names to the Fabulous Killjoys, but those were _their_ names for you. 

And you haven’t done anything. You haven’t done what everyone had always said you would do, you haven’t taken down BL/ind or saved the world or set the desert free. You’ve wandered and survived, flown under the radar.

So you’re just the Girl. And the cat is just the cat.

You feel less lonely with it, though. When you travel through the Zones, it’s a companion to you. You talk to it, talk about the desert and fate and what is left of the Fabulous Killjoys, talk about the stars that Jet used to tell you the names of, the way the desert lives so freely, the way the Fab Four used to _be_ the desert and now they’re gone. And sometimes, it feels like it listens. 

The cat becomes a kind of good luck charm. You visit a market, and as soon as you leave, there’s news of a raid there that you narrowly miss being caught in. It can be eerie at times, but you still value the luck it brings. 

The cat never leaves you. It walks by your side and rests on your shoulders and follows you wherever you go. It sticks with you, and you appreciate it. It does what no one in the desert seems to be able to do.

* * *

When you finally start running with a new crew, you’re sixteen. It’s been almost eight years since the Fabulous Four had died in that lobby, six years since you left Dr. D’s station, about a year after you took the cat with you. 

It starts with a BLi ambush. You’re in another party in Zone Three, still chasing rumors and still being chased by dracs, when BL/ind crashes the party.

Parties like these are masked, anonymous gatherings for trading information—among other things. Most killjoys are masked in day-to-day life, hiding their faces from BLi, but you don’t have a mask. You don’t have a mask for the same reason you don’t have a killjoy name. You don’t deserve it.

You don’t have your own mask, but at the entrance of the bunker where the party is, there’s a basket filled with plain, black masks. 

You still don’t wear killjoy colors. You stay in your brown leather jacket and black clothes, quietly unnoticed in the background. You’re not a killjoy, not really. You’re not a Neutral, either, and you’re definitely not part of BL/ind. You’ve found that you don’t know what you are; you just know what you aren’t.

But you know what you’re living for.

So you walk into the party with nothing but your gun, a pouch of carbons, and your cat. You slip on one of the black masks and wait for your informant in one of the back booths, nursing a drink you took on the way in. 

The party has just started. Colored lights flash throughout the dark room, music blasting through speakers. Drinks and drugs travel through the dark room, and ‘joys dance through the night. Everyone knows what these parties are like; they almost always end in a dead body buried in the sand somewhere nearby, whether it’s from too much drink or some ‘joy taking things too far. 

But these gatherings always have good informants around, and they’re _fun_. The parties are the life of a killjoy, living life dangerous and free rather than safe and trapped. There’s always plenty of drink, but some of it is shit and some of it is drugged, so you try not to take too much. But it stands out if you don’t take anything.

You wait and watch as it gets more and more wild, as smoke begins to take up every inch of air, and you keep your nose in your drink. The luneshine that walks to where you sit is tall and thin, with blue-green hair tied in a tail, exposing their dark skin. Their mask covers their entire face, silver with no designs except green tears under their eyes. It matches their outfit, neon green and silver.

They slip into the seat across from you.

You take a sip of your drink, savoring the too sweet alcohol. “You must be Silver Cyanide,” you say.

“And you must be the famous Girl.”

You put down your drink. “Let’s skip the pleasantries. What d’you know about Party Poison’s mask?”

They lean back. “Depends how many carbons you have.”

You slide five carbons towards them, and they pick the money off with one neon gloved hand. 

They tip their head back and laugh. Since their mask covers their face, they seem to make up for it by showing emotion with their whole body. “Darling, you’re not going to get _anythin'_ out of me with _that_.”

You give them five more carbons and relax, trying not to show how tense you are. But you still have one hand on your gun. You ask, “Where was it last?”

You can hear their smirk. “I’ll do you one better. I know who has it right now.”

“Who?” you say, less of a question and more of a demand.

They motion for more carbons. You roll your eyes and drop three more into their open hand.

But before they can say anything, the music stops. The sudden silence makes you both shoot glances in the direction of the DJ. Instead of the hot pink haired sunshine that had been there a moment ago, you see a Scarecrow that you don’t recognize.

She wears a black pantsuit and a long coat. A round bob frames her face, and she sneers at the crowd. She throws the body of the DJ off the stage, and the killjoys around her draw guns and knives. 

She kicks the DJ equipment off too. It lands with a crash, and a ripple goes through the crowd. “Hello, Zone rats. Which one of you is Adelina Kingson?”

A killjoy who looks to be a few years older than you climbs onto a table next to yours. She has shoulder length black hair with ends dyed the color of Party’s, a mask painted with flames on one side, and a gun painted black. 

“Goddamn it,” you hear Cyanide whisper beside you.

The ‘joy on the table aims her gun at the Scarecrow.

The killjoy takes the shot and snarls, “It’s Night Fire, you shit eating Ritalin Rat.”

You’ve heard the name before. She’s some Crash Queen that escaped from the City and made her name in arson. She seems unconcerned with the rest of the room knowing her City name, but you guess that she probably knows that she’s hunted, that she won’t survive long enough for that to matter. She knows as well as you do that burning down BLi buildings is bound to catch their attention at some point.

Her shot goes wide, and the room explodes into action.

Killjoys throw themselves at the Scarecrow, ray guns blazing. You draw your own, grab your cat, and stand, searching for a way out. Every killjoy party has to have at least a few escapes. But moments later, dracs pour in from seemingly nowhere. Fuck. They’ve probably already covered every escape route. You’re trapped with everyone else in here.

Either you or BLi will get out of this one.

“Look,” Cyanide hisses, somehow right beside your ear, “If you can get me and Night out, I’ll give you your money back _and_ all the info you want.”

You weigh the risks for half a second. This Night Fire is a Crash Queen; she’s bound to fail. But she clearly means something to your informant. They know who has Party’s mask. If you get out now, though, you have a better chance of survival. All that’s outside those escape routes are dracs, there’s most likely no other Crows. Besides, Night Fire isn’t going to survive much longer anyway. You’ve seen how killjoys being chased by Scarecrows end up. 

But Cyanide’s offer sticks in your mind. You need those carbons, and you need that information. 

_Destroya,_ you think, _this is_ not _going to end well, is it?_

“Fine,” you growl to them. “Where is she?”

They take a neon green gun from their long silver coat and motion to the stage. Night Fire and the Scarecrow are fighting hand-to-hand, and you spot both of their guns kicked off the stage.

You try to aim from where you are, but they’re wrestling and too close together. You still aren’t a good shot; you spend too much time running to practice. So you push through the crowd, forcing your way to two of them.

You see Cyanide doing the same, but with more success. They wield twin daggers with ease, and true to their name, the silver seems to be poisoned. They cut their way through dracs, leaving writhing white forms on the ground, splattered with crimson. They seem strangely ethereal, with their silver coat and weapons flashing, their mask reflecting the flaring lights of the party. They don’t move with the same causal grace that they did when bargaining with you. They move with purpose, defined motions and a clear goal. 

You get to the stage a few seconds after they do.

But Night and the Scarecrow are still too close together for Cyanide to use their knives.

You need to distract the Crow. 

So you clamber onto the stage and grab the microphone. You yell, “Killjoys, it’s time to hit the red line, so keep your guns close and pull a Malevolent Red ‘cos this party is goin’ all Costa Rica!”

The ‘joys in the party get the message, and duck. You fire a spray of plasma, taking down most of the dracs. The killjoys around you take down the rest.

You turn to find the Scarecrow kicking Night Fire away from her and marching to you. Seems you distracted her a bit too much. She reaches out and rips off your black mask, throwing it to the side.

The Scarecrow leers down at you, her perfect cheekbones reflecting the flashing lights of the party. “So you’re the Girl.”

You try to back away, but there’s no room. The Scarecrow takes you by the shoulders and slams you into the wall beside the stage. Panic unfurls in your stomach, and you struggle, but the Crow’s grip is iron. She’s taller than you, and she’s got you against a wall, and suddenly, you can’t help but see yourself like you had seen Party all those years ago. Cornered by a Scarecrow, looking death in the eye.

You spit in her face, and she flinches. 

In one sudden, fluid motion, Cyanide wrenches the Scarecrow off of you and slits her throat. Blood runs from her throat into her ripped suit and clothes, crimson staining her white undershirt. They drop her to the side, and you fall forward, panting on your hands and knees. You stumble to your feet and check the charges in your ray gun. Still full. _Weird._

You don’t have time to dwell on it, though, so you pat down the Scarecrow’s coat for supplies. Her clothes are unusable; they’re ripped to shreds. She doesn’t have anything of good quality on her, so you let the rest of the ‘joys in the party have at her. You follow Cyanide to where they’re binding a knife wound in Night’s shoulder. 

The other killjoys are already dispersing, knowing that a BLi cleanup crew is on the way. You search the party and spot your cat hiding in the corner, blending with the shadows. It walks to you, and you hug him. 

The cat follows you as you walk to Cyanide, avoiding puddles of blood and drac bodies.

“We have to go,” you tell Cyanide.

They shake their head. “Night—”

You cut them off. “We’ll bring her. We just have to get out. BLi’s coming and they’re not going to be happy.”

You can hear the scowl in their voice. “Fine.”

You walk out of the bunker where the party had been, that cat in your arms. Cyanide walks behind you with Night leaning on their shoulders. You wonder, dimly, why they care so much about her. Anyone in the desert can see that Night is just another spark. Another candle in a desert full of them, another flame that will burn bright and fast, with nothing but smoke and ash left in its wake. 

But it’s what makes the desert the desert. It is a land full of stars that burn in and out of existence in the space between two heartbeats, a world made from mayflies that are there and gone in a single day, blazing and burning in a single volatile instant. The Zones are a place made from art scratched into walls as if it would make a difference whether you live or die. A desert full of tiny sparks trying to create a flame. A world made of the harsh, beautiful freedoms that eclipse the cold longevity of Better Living Industries.

This is why everyone in the desert fights so hard to hold on. 

You all fight for moments. Seconds. A flash of emotion.

* * *

You escape with Cyanide and Night to the old diner. It’s the only safe place with enough supplies to take care of the three of you. BL/ind has been ravaging the desert these days, searching for _something,_ but you don’t know what. They’re always looking for something.

There’s a pattern you’ve noticed over the years as you watch the Zones in your detached sort of way. BLi seems to calm down, and the desert relaxes, stops tugging the rope that is the everlasting war. Then Better Living takes the desert by surprise, sends out Crows and dracs and exterminators, forces the desert to its knees. The desert bites back, and after a few big claps, BLi calms down, and the cycle begins anew.

The problem is that the desert falls for the same tricks every time. 

And the thing is, you can only see this pattern because you’ve lived here for so long. You’re rare. Lucky. Hardly anyone lives to sixteen in the desert, or if they do, they only recently escaped the City. 

The lucky ones, the ones who live as long as you do, tend to think that they’ll save the desert. Be the new Party Poison. Take the City down, once and for all. But you know, you’ve known for years that the City is too big. Too powerful.

Sometimes you think living in the desert can be too freeing. Far too many killjoys kill for the sake of killing. Too many don’t care what they do. You understand that destruction is a spit in the face of BLi, but you have boundaries. You wish that there could be a middle ground, somewhere between perfect, straight lines and jagged scribbles. But it’s no secret that the Zones and BLi hate each other. So you tell yourself that someday, _someday_ there might be peace. 

You never used to think like this when you were wandering. Yeah, you would foster your hatred of Better Living, you would talk to yourself, to your cat, about your half-thought-out plans, but you had never thought about if the City could be right.

You used to, before wandering, before the Fab Four died, before you knew anything about this world. And maybe that’s why you’re thinking about it now, because you’re back here, in the tiny oasis that the Fab Four had lived in, the only home you’ve ever had that stayed in one place. A home made from faded spray paint on its walls, symbols and slogans that never really die. This is the place where Party Poison had looked to the sky and cried from the weight of stars. The desert may be your childhood, but this diner is made from memories.

You can’t explain the feeling you get when you walk in. Cyanide and Night immediately begin exploring, searching for supplies, but you can’t bring yourself to join them. Instead, you float from room to room like a ghost. 

You are one, in a way. The old you, the Moterbaby, the Missile Kid, the child who had been told that she was special a hundred different times but didn’t know why— _she_ is dead. And you are her ghost.

You understand more of the desert. You see everything, and you’ve seen everything. You haunt your memories, and they haunt you. 

Night finally takes notice of you. “You ‘kay?”

“Yeah,” you say, but your voice is weak.

Cyanide is sorting through drawers, pocketing anything useful. But they still don’t take their mask off. You suppose that there’s some sort of injury under the silver and green mask, hidden in the shadows. You’re curious about it, but you don’t pry. 

You don’t know how long you’re going to stay with them. You haven’t had the chance to grill Cyanide about their information or their carbons; you’ve been busy running. Ever since Night escaped the party and Cyanide killed the Crow, BLi has been practically on top of you. 

But now you have a break. A lapse of time for you to get what you need from Cyanide and bolt. But you need to lay low and hide for a little while. 

So you’ll stay with them for now. Get what you need and get out. Leave them behind just like you left everyone else.

* * *

Later, near midnight, you sit on the roof of the old diner. The sky is clear, and you can see the stars and satellites shine bright against the deep blue space around them. Your cat is somewhere downstairs, asleep on your old mattress, which is still somehow here. 

You remember sitting here with them. Party and Ghoul on one side, Jet and Kobra on the other. Quiet stories and soft smiles, late nights and early sunsets, watching the sky change colors, letting time pass in idle waves. You remember the pressure of Party’s arm around your shoulders, Jet’s quiet voice as he pointed the constellations out and told you their names and their stories. You remember snippets of their voices, but you find yourself forgetting the exact pitch of Ghoul’s raucous laughter, the low growl of Jet’s voice.

You wish that you could remember everything sometimes. 

You haven’t accepted that you’re forgetting them, but you don’t have a choice in the matter.

You find that the most ironic thing of all is that the Zones had never truly been free. It is just another sort of trapped. You’re free to be whoever you want to be, but everyone is stuck in an endless cycle of running and fighting and losing everything until you either end up in a body bag or behind a drac mask. You’re free to feel, but you’re still trapped in a cage of expectations. The rope that is fate still binds you, and the ink on the raven’s feather that the Witch had written your destiny with is now dry. 

Perhaps there is no true freedom. Maybe this is the best it can ever get, at least before you’re a ghost haunting the sands of the desert.

You haven’t spoken to the Witch in a while. You remember that Party had never been one for religion, but Jet had believed. He had always had prayer beads wound around his wrist, and sometimes, when he had thought you weren’t looking, Jet had brought them to his lips and whispered a prayer to the Phoenix Witch. \

You remember that the time you had asked, he just smiled at you sadly and said, “Lost too many.”

Jet had never spoken much, but he had always seemed to give words to you. You suppose that you should have valued them more.

So you look into the desert and whisper in prayer, “How many ghosts hang in my shadow?”

The desert remains silent. Your radio is downstairs, and Cyanide is on watch there. You’re supposed to be asleep, but you’re here instead.

You keep talking. “Huh, Phoenix Witch? How many are dead at my hands? The Fab Four, definitely. What about all those other ‘joys? The ones who had full faith in me saving them, who… who thought I was some sort of Destroya incarnate? And what about the ones who helped me ‘cuz of the Fab Four and got ghosted for that?”

The night stretches on.

“If I get what I need from Cyanide and ditch them and Night, and they end up dead, is that on me? Just tell me. I need to know.”

You sigh and rub your face, wiping hot tears from your eyes.

“I just… I need a sign. I’ve been looking for Party’s mask for so long, and they’re still haunting my shadow, I know that. But how many more masks will I have to put in your Mailbox? How many do I have to now? Just tell me where to go from here. Just tell me… I miss them. I miss my family. Party deserves peace, don’t you think? How long before they get it? I know that you’ve got your destiny and design all written up, but give me something. Please.”

You duck your head and run your hands down your hair. You let the silence of the night expand and gain weight around your breaths.

Then you murmur quietly. “I can’t just keep running, Phoenix Witch. I can’t just keep losing everything.”

You sigh again and force yourself to stand. You can still feel the weight of ghosts on your shoulders, but something about asking Her helped. 

You make your way downstairs and walk to Cyanide. 

You say, “Go to sleep. I’ll take next watch.”

They frown and whisper back, “You’re still up? C’mon, you go to sleep. I can take this one.”

You shake your head. “I’m not tired. Just go.”

They, for one, look exhausted. They still have their mask on, but they’re slouched over and clearly barely awake. So they give in, and walk to where Night is sleeping. 

There’s something between the two of them, but you know better than to pry. Better to get what you need and get out, before the claws that you call caring latch on and dig in.

You listen to the radio with half an ear, but right now, it’s just static.

You watch the desert night through windows, memories flashing of you peering through them as a child, and you half-remember how the moonlight would glint through the panes, how Kobra had accidentally shattered the window in the corner, how you used to pretend that the broken glass were diamonds. You had found such beauty in broken things. 

All that is broken now are your dissonant memories, incomplete and out of focus. They haunt your every step in this broken palace of yours. You wonder just how much beauty hides in your mangled memories.

* * *

You trade watches with Cyanide through the next few nights, and you let Night sleep. She’s the most injured. One look at Cyanide tells you that they aren’t going to wake her up for night watch and if you do, it’s your head on the line. 

You’re not tired, anyway.

And you’re used to sleeping with one eye open. Traveling alone is dangerous, even more so at night. So you know how to sleep lightly, with one hand always resting on your gun. It’s a skill most Zone rats grow into the longer they live. 

Right now, it’s Cyanide’s turn to take watch, but you can’t get yourself to sleep. After fifteen minutes of tossing and turning, you walk to where they’re watching at the front of the diner and silently sit next to them. They nod at you and continue staring into the darkness.

“What’s behind the mask?” you ask, voice low.

You figure that you may as well ask, even if they don’t answer.

They laugh bitterly. “Scars. Memories.”

They don’t elaborate, and you don’t ask for more details.

The silence that rests between you is tense, filled with secrets that you don’t know and questions you don’t want to ask. 

Cyanide breaks the silence for you. “The ‘joy you’re looking for is named Riot. He’s somewhere in Zone One right now with Poison’s mask. The carbons are in a bag on the table.”

You look at them. They are staring out into the darkness, curled up with their hands on their lime-green gun. It’s hard to get a read on them. Their mask casts shadows over their eyes, only letting you see what emotions they want you to see.

They continue, “He won’t just give it to you, though. Riot… he’s stubborn. And he thinks that he’ll save the world.”

You ask, “How do you know him?”

Their answer is short. “We were family.”

“Were?”

“Were.”

Another silence stretches between you. 

Then you say quietly, “We can go to Zone One together if you want.”

Cyanide is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” they say. “Night too.”

“Okay,” you say.

You don’t know why you’re offering this. You don’t know why they’re accepting. 

You wonder if you’re replacing the Fab Four, but you tell yourself that Cyanide and Night aren’t crew, and you are not one of them. You just need the company. 

You tell yourself so many things. 

You tell yourself that this is good, that maybe you can finally, _finally_ find Party’s mask and bring them to peace, that maybe you will move on from them, take that first step out of their shadow. You don’t know how to feel about that.

You don’t want to let go of any of them, but your life must go on. The world is still spinning, and you are too.

The silence is comfortable now, and you stare into the empty spaces of the desert. It is quiet at night. The stars have settled, twinkling and watching, watching it burn and falter and fall and stand, over and over again. You wonder just how much the stars and satellites above you see. What they feel. Do they see BL/ind and cry? Or is it the desert they cry at, the guns and ash and dust, the dead and the dusted? Or do they look upon the world and watch all of humanity, every interlocking part of it?

You wonder if they don’t care. If they see the world and decide that the black and white of BLi and the colors and lights of the Zones and disregard them, throw them to the side. Watch them burn and fade with no regard for them.

But you think that those stars and satellites are the watchers of the universe, and surely when you watch something long enough, that poisonous flower that grows from the broken and burned roots, that flower that stems from perception the Zones call caring, takes hold. Surely the stars and the satellites care after seeing so many flames snuffed out. Surely the Witch cares after hearing so many prayers. Somebody in this too-large world has to care.

* * *

You don’t have wheels, and neither Night nor Cyanide do either, so you’re stuck travelling on foot all the way back to Zone One. You’re halfway there, at the edge of Zone Three, hiding from patrols in an old ruin. You’ve been running from a patrol unit for three straight days, narrowly avoiding them and shooting as many as you can. 

It’s strange. Every time you think you’ve lost them, they show up again, they find you and you barely get out alive. You know that neither Cyanide nor Night are BLi agents, but some part of you can’t help but watch them more carefully. You _know_ that Night had a Scarecrow after her and therefore can’t be an agent—because why would BLi send an agent after their own spy just for a cover? And you _know_ that Cyanide can’t be a spy either—because why waste a Scarecrow by having your own agent kill it? You _know_ this, you know all of the broken logic and clear fallacies of suspecting either or both of them, but you can’t help being paranoid.

Paranoia is a good trait to have in the Zones. It always has been. You remember that Party had never truly trusted anyone outside of the Fab Four and you. They hadn’t even really trusted Dr. D. But it had been that paranoia that kept you alive.

You trust your gut, and something tells you that someone here cannot be trusted. You just don’t know who.

There is an overwhelming feeling of somebody watching you. It is as if you are in a dark room and there are eyes and whispers all around you, but you cannot see them and cannot hear what they are saying. Your skin prickles and you feel around, but there is no one there.

Both Night and Cyanide clearly feel it too. They steal glances at you after you get caught for the third time, and they watch each other just as carefully. 

You’re squeezed between Cyanide and a stone wall, knees pulled to your chest and gun in your lap. The only light you can see is a beam of moonlight that traces its way from a crack in the wall next to Night. The cat is resting on an empty shelf above you.

Cyanide pulls their coat tighter around them, and you try to lean away as much as possible. Night is trying not to touch them, too. You’ve noticed that most of the City-born are adamant about not being touched. You don’t care, because you may have been City-born, but you are desert-raised. You don’t know what BLi does to create the aversion, but you had seen it enough in the Fab Four to see it everywhere. You see it the same way you see the tremors that are coded into the nervous system of those who have taken the pills that BLi gave them.

A tense silence stretches between the three of you. You can’t make noise right now; it’s too dangerous. A patrol could come at any minute, and if they hear you, then you’re as good as dead.

But Cyanide is shaking, now. They’re curled into a ball, trembling in the dark. You don’t know their past, but even to you, the cramped space is too small.

You reach out your hand and place it, palm-up, on the ground between you. An offering of comfort, much the same as your offering of company a few days earlier. They don’t seem to see it. They’re staring at a spot on the wall, hands fisted around their coat. 

You steal a glance at Night and find her eyes locked on Cyanide. You stare at her, and when her gaze finally meets yours, you give them a meaningful look, then you jerk your head at Cyanide. Your intent is clear. _Help them because I can’t._

Night carefully places a hand on Cyanide’s arm. They don’t jerk away, but you see them tense up. Night just grips their arm tighter.

You start to sit up, prepared for any kind of reaction, but Night looks you in the eye and shakes her head. _Trust me_.

You let her get closer to Cyanide. 

Night slides closer. She whispers, “Cye? It’s me.”

Cyanide doesn’t react.

Night continues, “Hey, look, I know this sucks, yeah? But can you look at me?”

Cyanide’s head lurches up, and they slowly turn their head to look at Night. 

Night says, “Perfect. Okay, breathe with me. And keep looking at me.”

She calms Cyanide to the point where they’re not shaking anymore, whispering encouragement the whole time. You wish you could help.

A strange sort of longing takes hold of you, looking at them. You’ve never really felt any wish for a romantic relationship, but you want someone that knows you as well as Night and Cyanide know each other. You want someone to be there when the shit hits the fan.

You know that you can’t have that. You have too much history in the desert. Too many lives had depended on yours, too many people had sacrificed themselves to get you out of Battery City _twice_ , only to be disappointed by you. You can’t beat BLi. You can’t do what everyone says you will, and you don’t even try. You wander and search for a piece of history, a shard of memory. 

As you watch Cyanide and Night curl into each other, you suddenly wish you hadn’t asked them to come. This moment feels too intimate, too close for you to be here. So you try to look away, stare vacantly at a spot on the wall and ignore the hushed whispers of the two ‘joys beside you.

You realize, again, that they’ll never really be your family. They know each other too well, and no one will ever know you. Not really.

Your history, your fame, will always cast a shadow over anyone’s perception of you. And you realize that maybe this is why everyone you know either left you or you left them. Because the future that you will never live through is all anyone sees, and you had always known in the back of your mind that you will never live through what they want you to.

Will you be the one to take down BLi? _No_ , you think. _I can never do it. No one can._

Despair is an odd feeling. It doesn’t feel like a pit, or a dark room, or a hundred other metaphors and comparisons that you have already been spun. It feels like you’re walking through the desert with an empty water bottle. You forget about it, until you unconsciously reach for the bottle and realize there’s nothing in there. Your mouth goes dry, and you look around, but there’s nothing around you.You realize how hot you are, how much sand and sun and sky there is. You are too aware of the lack of water in the bottle, too aware that every step, that every breath is taking something out of you. And suddenly despair is everywhere.

It leaches you dry until you can’t breathe without feeling it, and every movement feels like the heat you’re moving through is tangible, wrapping around your limbs and dragging you down.

This spot in time, watching two ‘joys that know each other better than you could ever know anybody, this is you reaching for an empty bottle.

Everyone who meets you has too many expectations, too many things that are assumed, that you’re special, that you have power that you _don’t have_. You realize that you will always be alone, no matter how many people are around you. 

You curl in on yourself at the thought, and you spend the night staring at the wall in front of you.

* * *

You never do ask about Cyanide’s past. You’ve learned, over the years, that digging around in other people’s lives is one way to get ghosted. It feels unfair, though. Everyone knows your past. They all know about the Fab Four, about how you had been captured and saved, about how you got your family killed. They all know about you.

And some of them think that they know you.

But you know better than to dig into Cyanide’s life.

So you continue on, you keep going like you always have. 

You’re camping out in a cave, and you’re technically supposed to be asleep, but you can’t make yourself. Night is sitting by the front, keeping watch. When she had found out that Cyanide and you weren’t letting her do watches in order for her to heal, she had thrown a fit. Of course, after a few minutes of fighting, Cyanide had decided to let her take watches too, but they had to be shorter than yours or theirs.

She doesn’t look that bad anymore, though. Her shoulder is healing, and the wounds she had gotten from the constant claps are minor. 

You walk up to Night and sit beside her. Her mask is off, but you see two large X’s drawn over her eyes.

She flashes a smile at you. “Can’t sleep?”

“Yeah,” you say, “I don’t really sleep that much.”

She laughs. “Neither do I.” She pauses for a moment. “You’ve been running on your own for a while, haven’t you?”

You hum in agreement.

She stares at you, and you pretend not to notice. Then she says, “Ever tried a new crew?”

You start, “I’m sorry, but I’m not really—”

Night cuts you off. “Look, I’m not saying that you should join Cye and me; I’m just saying that maybe you shouldn’t be alone all the time.”

You’re silent for a while. Then you say, “I guess. I don’t know… My life has just centered around the Fab Four for so long.”

She snorts. “No offense or anything, but the way I see it, they weren’t _that_ special. Yeah, they started the revolution, yeah, they got you out of the City twice, and yeah, they gave hope to the desert, but everything still sucks. Sure they made a legacy, but they didn’t _save the world_.”

“I guess,” you say. “They’re just so... big, even now.”

“But they don’t have to be. You’re more than their kid, y’know?”

You give her a look.

“You _are_.”

You lapse into another minute of quiet.

The Fabulous Killjoys may not have saved the world, but they will undoubtedly be a catalyst for whatever killjoy _does_ do it. They will inspire whoever manages to topple BLi, should anyone manage to. They have burned themselves into the memories of every killjoy in the desert. They spayed their name on BLi walls in such vibrant colors that BL/ind will _never_ wipe them out. The Fabulous Four made their names in action. They made their names in every bit of hope given to the desert.

You wonder if you will ever make a name in anything they haven’t already burned their marks into.

* * *

The first time you see Riot, your hand instinctively rests on your gun. He’s taller than you by about a foot, with both his hair and mask split dyed purple and green. The colors clash horribly, but looking at him, you suppose that’s the point. When you, Cyanide, and Night track him down, he’s on Route Guano, taking down a unit of exterminators by himself.

He uses a combination of throwing knives and a purple ray gun, and you can see a bit of Cyanide’s fighting style, their brutal efficiency and casual grace matching his. 

You walk up to him, stepping around the bodies. Cyanide and Night stay behind you, ready to run in if you need backup, but staying back on account of Cyanide’s history with Riot.

“You’re Riot?” you ask.

He takes a step and crushes an exterminator under his foot. In one movement, he points his gun down and blows the exterminator's head into plasma. Then he sheaths his gun and smiles at you. “The only one, doll.”

He speaks with the same drawl that Cyanide does, but something about the way it sounds on his tongue makes your fingers twitch. He squints at you.

“And you… You’re the Girl, aren’t you?”

You try to copy his casual attitude, but it ends up sounding poisonous. “The only one.”

He just laughs, sharp and biting. “And I suppose you’re here for Poison’s mask, if the rumors are true.”

Straight to the point, then.

“They are,” you say.

He stares at you for a moment. “I don’t have it.”

No. _No._ You start, “But Cyanide—”

He laughs again. “My _sibling_ thinks they know me. They think that I think I’m some sort of savior. And maybe I did, once. But not anymore.”

“Prove it.”

He cocks his head at you. “What?”

You wrap one hand around your gun. “You heard what I said. _Prove it._ ”

“Go ahead and search me, Girlie. You’re not gonna find your precious mask.”

To hell with this.

You launch yourself at him, and manage to get a good hook punch in before he reacts. He tries to wrestle you to the ground, but you roll away. You pull out your gun and aim it at him. 

By now, Night and Cyanide are behind you, guns and knives drawn. 

Night’s voice is rough. “Stand down, Riot.”

Riot raises both of his hands in a surrendering gesture. He snarls at you, “I don’t have it, you little bitch.”

Cyanide steps forward. Before they can say anything, Riot gives them a low growl. “And don’t think that I haven’t forgotten a _thing_ you did.”

Their knives glint in the setting sun. “I wasn’t the one that did anything.”

Riot looks between the three of you and then says, “Listen, I don’t have the fucking mask. If I did, I would have given it to you. It’s three against one, and my gun is spent. So go ahead, kill me if you want to, but you’re not gonna find it.”

Cyanide scoffs. “You’re bluffing.”

“For once, Cyanide, I’m not.”

Night takes a step forward. “Then I might as well just fill your head with plasma.”

“Wait,” you say. “If you don’t have it, where is it?”

A smile slowly stretches across his face. “Let me go, and I’ll tell you.”

You don’t care if he lives or dies. But you care about Party’s mask. You care about their ghost haunting your shadow, and you care about _them_. They deserve peace. So you say, “Fine.”

Cyanide makes a sound of protest, but you ignore them. Let them and their history have a fit. Riot clearly doesn’t have what you want, so you may as well let him go on his way.

He says, “Your word isn’t worth much to me.”

You smile sharply. “Neither is yours. But if what I get isn't the truth, then we can always come after you again.”

The threat isn’t anywhere near empty. And he knows it. 

So he looks you up and down, and says, “I sold it. I’m not gonna tell you to who or where, but it’s on the market.”

You force your face into neutrality and nod. Then you wave them off. “Run,” you say. “And keep running.”

He turns around and doesn’t look back.

* * *

Night finds you a few hours later. You had escaped, stomped off to the nearest bar, which happens to be a seedy place in an old underground bunker. The ‘joy behind the counter stares at you as you walk in, but you’re pissed enough that you don’t care anymore. 

Of course Riot sold the mask. Of fucking course, because soon as you think _anything_ is going your way, it always takes a hard left, and you’re left with another peice of yourself ripped away.

You really are a part of the desert, no matter how much you try to deny it. You drink down poisoned hope by the gallon, and then you get surprised when you get sick. And maybe that’s why you had broken ties with Dr. D and Pony, why you had never really trusted Newsie or Hot Chimp, why you still don’t completely trust Cyanide and Night. Because you _know_ that you’ll be left behind, that you’ll once again be the last one standing with nothing to stand for.

Some part of you begins to understand why some killjoys turn themselves in or shoot plasma into their heads. There’s only so much one person can take before they give up.

But you’re nowhere near there yet. You’re not melancholy from hopelessness, you’re furious from it. The whole Destroya damned world is still taking away everything you have left, and you’re letting it. It isn’t _fair._

You order a drink and sit in a back booth. You don’t want to talk with anyone right now. You want to sit in the corner of a shitty bar, nursing a shitty drink, thinking about every shitty thing that has ever happened to you.

But Night finds you. She strides in, taking a drink for herself, and sits across from you. 

She takes a sip and winces at the taste. “Thought I’d find you here.”

You take a drink to avoid having to respond. 

She sighs. “Look, I’ll get straight to the point because you don’t deserve to hear shitty advice that you don’t care about. Is this gonna be goodbye?”

You shrug. “I don’t know.”

It’s the truth. You have no idea where to start looking for Party’s mask. You’re back to square one; if it’s in the market, it could be anywhere. At least before, you had a list of names and places, but now you’ve gone through all of them.

“Do you want advice?”

Your smile is wry and dry. “I thought you said I didn’t deserve to hear ‘shitty advice you don’t care about.’”

“Well I desere a straight answer that you didn’t give, so you’re gonna have to put up with this.”

You shrug again. “That’s fair.”

She looks around the bar for a minute. “Well, I’m gonna be blunt and you don’t have to follow anything I say. Just keep that in mind. I think you should move on. At some point, when a mask is lost, it’s lost. We’ve all had people die on us and not been able to bring their souls to the Witch. If you really want to get out of the Fab Four’s shadow, you gotta stop centering your life around them. That’s what all of this is about, remember? That there’s more to life than hanging around in the past.”

You stare at the table. Follow the bruises and scars with your eyes. “I don’t know if you _want_ to let them go yet. They’re family.”

She leans on the table to look you in the eyes. “They _were_ family.”

You flinch. You know that, but it still hurts.

It’s hard to let go. They were with you half your life, and you don’t want to leave them behind. You miss them. Longing still sits in your chest, and you still want to reach out and grab onto them. You want every piece of them to be right here; you want them to stay with you forever.

She gives you a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, kid, but they’re gone and you’re what's left. I’m pretty sure Poison never in a thousand years would want you to just end up chasing their mask for eternity. If you keep going like this what will _you_ have left? And once you get it? Once you deliver their soul to the Witch? You need to build your own life, too.”

Her words strike you, and part of you sees her point, understands what she’s saying and why, because the past few years, you haven’t done _anything_ except chase whispers and rumors. It’s like you’re drowning in the past, but you can’t help it.

But you need air. You need to face reality.

“I _know._ It’s just—” You break off, and you can feel tears welling up.

Night puts a hand on yours, her skin warm. You duck your head and swipe the salty tears from your eyes.

“C’mon,” Night says. “Let’s get out of here.”

You stand, and as you walk to the exit, she wraps an arm around your shoulders. You lean into the touch and let her lead you out of the bar.

Maybe you should. Maybe you should move on, get past whatever has been keeping you here for so long. 

You can try, can’t you? 

_That was water_ , you realize. Night’s advice is water pouring into dirt, awakening a long-dormant seed that had been born from Party Poison’s tears on a roof so long ago. 

No one can live forever. Not even them. They can live in art and legend and distant memory, their legacies will reach on and on and on, but that’s all. You can’t bring them back. Maybe Party Poison will haunt your shadow forever, but you can’t do anything about that. It isn’t as if you haven’t tried.

You’ve spent _years_ running around the Zones, searching for something that you don’t think you’ll ever find. So maybe it’s time to move on. And maybe this time, if you try hard enough, you can do it.

You can carry on their memory, you can bring peace to them, but your life is ultimately yours. Yours to live and yours to do what you wish. 

* * *

You decide, in the end, to stay with them. You run with them, and you decide to listen to Night. You try to build something for yourself, leave your own legacy rather than depend on what the Fab Four left behind.

They’re dead. They’re dead, and you have to accept that. They’re dead, and you have to move past it.

But Night and Cyanide are alive. They’re alive, and the Fab Four are dead.

So you open your sketchbook for the first time in years. You keep drawing. Keep creating. Keep feeling.

But in the back of your mind, you keep an eye out for Party’s mask. You remember, and you reflect, but you don’t live in your memories. 

Maybe Riot’s selling of the mask was what you had begged the Witch for. Maybe it’s her telling you to move on, that what you want will come to you when it comes. A watched pot never boils.

So you keep your eyes off the flame and keep running. 

* * *

You had never known that the world could end more than once. No, that isn’t true, you had known. You had _known_ this would happen. Because of course it would. You should have known that if it’s good, it’s not going to last.

You say as much to Night, but she laughs it off. 

You’re in the aimless dunes of the desert, where sand stretches for miles and miles with nothing to work as cover. The three of you still travel by foot, and your supplies are fine. But you should have seen this coming.

You don’t notice the BL/ind truck until it crosses the horizon line. The sun is right above you, rays beating down on your backs, and it’s practically a spotlight for BLi to see you. 

And they do see you.

You don’t have any cover. You don’t have any backup. You’re stuck here, and there’s an odd sort of irony to it all. This had been the situation the Fab Four had been in all those years ago, though a touch less severe. 

You draw your gun and check the battery. Full. Good. Cyanide and Night draw their own weapons. You wave your cat off, and it seems to get what you want it to because it scampers off. It’ll find you after the clap. It always does.

Cyanide asks, “Any plans?”

You say, “Not at the moment.”

Night says, “Don’t die? There’s not much we can do.”

Cyanide reaches out a hand and squeezes Night’s arm. They say, “If we don’t get out of this—”

Night cuts them off. “ _Don’t_ finish that sentence. We’re getting out of this.”

The truck is getting closer, so you send a shot at the tires. It misses the tire, but the truck pulls to a stop. Eight dracs climb out, guns at the ready.

Night fires at one of the dracs, and the clap begins.

Her shot goes wild, a rain of laser fire coming in as a response. You shoot haphazardly in the direction of the dracs, but the distance is too far for your aim. Cyanide’s a poor shot as well, but at least they’re fucking _deadly_ in close quarters.

The problem is that you don’t have any advantages here. You’re alone and drastically outnumbered in a flat plain of desert, with no car or bike or any way of getting out. You have your guns and that’s it—there’s no room for clever strategy, no leeway that will allow you to escape.

So you decide to walk into the fire. 

The plasma blasts rain around you, the heat sending sparks of pain shooting through your body. You start running, ducking under bolts of white, your feet pounding against the sand. Time stretches with the fire.

You don’t know how you get there, but you do. You spin backward, your hair flying into your face and momentarily obscuring your vision, and take another shot at a drac as the plasma sears your skin.

You feel a smile tug at your lips as it drives itself into the drac’s chest.

The blast isn’t powerful enough to kill it, but it slows it down, letting Night shoot it in the head. One down, seven to go.

Night is shooting from a distance, her blasts of red stark against the blue sky. Cyanide is fighting off three dracs, their knives flashing and teeth set in a bloody grin. Two of the remaining dracs start running for you, and the other two shoot for Night. 

As they get nearer to you, you back up and try to shoot. But your aim always goes haywire in the middle of claps, and the best you can do is hit one of them in the shoulder. The other closes in on you, dead eyes boring into your own—but as it grabs for you you dart to the side, its fingers closing in on air, burning where your arm used to be. The drac falls forward, onto the sand.

You, however, land right in the arms of the injured drac. It doesn’t seem to notice its injury, and it reminds you, strangely, of a mangled droid. The way it wraps its arms around you despite the burn brings memories of droids dragging themselves through the desert despite having stumps for legs. It reacts to the pain, but it still carries out whatever instructions it’s given—and the thought alone is what terrifies you.

Its grip is as tight as you remember it being from all those years ago. You try to wrench yourself out, but it has its vices on you, and it’s not letting go.

You catch a glimpse of Cyanide cutting the throat of one of the dracs they are fighting off, and you flash them a smile. They’re having more luck. You can’t see Night, but you can hear her, the high, sharp cry of her ray gun.

The drac from earlier starts to rise. You nail it in the foot with your own gun, the metal burning into your palm. It, like the one holding you, ignores the wound and tries to stand, but its burned foot collapses under it; you manage to shoot it in the head before the drac holding you jerks the gun from your grip.

You struggle and lash out, flailing your arms and legs. It’s a pure accident that you manage to jerk its arm in a way that forces it to drop you, but you don’t allow yourself to savor the moment as you pull it down by its ankle. You launch yourself at it before it can recover, knocking its gun out of its hand, and shoot it in the head at point-blank range.

As soon as you turn around, you hear Cyanide scream. 

The breath stops in your chest.

It’s enough to pierce through the haze of the fight—you know that scream. It’s the same that tore itself from your lips when Korse killed Party. Desperation and denial clawing up your throat, blank horror stamped all over your face. 

You jerk your head toward the three dead bodies that litter the ground around them, slash marks coating their corpses, blood staining their white uniforms crimson.

But that isn’t what Cyanide is looking at. 

You follow their gaze. Follow it to the drac standing over Night’s body.

_No. Not her too._

Cyanide throws themselves toward the drac, teeth set in a feral growl. Their knives flash in the glow of the desert, silver one moment and red in the next, the blood of the drac staining the ground in a matter of seconds. Even after you see it go limp, they drive the weapon down, again and again and again with a ferocity as intense as the midday sun. They stab until crimson stains the desert red, until it’s pooling around their knees, until the only sounds left from the battle are their own battered, broken breaths.

You run to them. “Cyanide,” you say, and reach out for their shoulder. 

They spin, and their silver mask is splattered with red. “Don’t touch me!” 

“ _Cyanide,_ ” you say, a harder edge to your voice.

They continue tearing the drac to bloody pieces. “What? It deserves it.”

You start to say, “Look—”

But their head snaps up, and suddenly, they look back at the mangled corpse at their feet. The knife drops from their fingers, and they stand to face _you_ instead. “You don’t get to talk to me, _Girl_ .” Their voice rips from their throat in a beaten snarl. “You were supposed to save us all, and you got her fucking killed. You’re not special. The Fabulous Four might have raised you, they might have brought you from the City, but you are _nothing._ ” Their voice breaks on the last word.

You flinch. You _know_ that already. If you had been faster, if you had been stronger, then maybe you could have gotten to her. But no. Night Fire is just another ghost in your shadow. More blood on your hands. 

You know, and yet you find yourself lashing back, “And what are you? You didn’t save her either.”

They step towards you, and you can’t see the tears in their eyes, but you know they’re there. You can’t speak. You have your own tears running down your cheeks, heat on your face that isn’t from the sunlight.

They point to the road behind you. “Go.”

“Cye—”

“I said _go_.” They point their neon green gun at you, and you freeze.

You stumble backwards. 

“Cyanide,” you say, trying to be calming. 

You can hear the sneer in their voice. “Run, Girl. And keep running. You better hope I don’t see you after this.”

You want to growl at them, tell them that you saved their ass a hundred times, and just because you couldn’t save _her_ doesn’t make you their enemy. But you suppose that in the end, it does. Cyanide loved Night. And now she’s gone. And you could have saved her.

But you didn’t.

So you walk away.

Maybe Cyanide and Night weren’t your family, but they were as close as anyone had ever gotten lately. And you just lost both of them.

You wish that for once in your life, you would stop destroying everything you touch.

* * *

After so long of being alone, you thought that you would be used to it. You were wrong, of course. But now it’s just you again, drifting through the never-ending desert. 

You let your mind wander sometimes, let yourself fall into the past and float away from yourself. You don’t know where you are going. You don’t know what you’re going to do.

For so long, you’ve been focused on one thing—Party Poison’s mask. But in the last ten years, you have never been able to find it. Riot had been the closest you’ve gotten, but now it’s lost in the desert market again. But you let go of that. Night was _right_ , your life is your own.

Your life is yours, but how do you live one with nothing in it? This is what you have left. _This._ Empty static and emptier sands, departing memories, the Phoenix Witch tailing you and taking whom She wishes to take.

Maybe what they say is true. You can either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Is this what you are?

You walk through the desert, spreading false hope and death, and now… Now you don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.

Is BLi _really_ evil? What if they _are_ just trying to bring order to the universe? You suppose the desert does that too, in a way. BL/ind brings order through law and the desert brings order through art. Both sides have killed too many. And both sides are just trying to make sense of the world.

The lines between morality and immorality look so thin sometimes. They blur in so many different contexts, until the line isn’t so much a line, but shades of “right” and “wrong” mixed in different quantities. Maybe the question of morality is just another truth that you have yet to find. 

But then again, what even is truth? What is this thing, this piece of the puzzle that you’ve been searching for ten years to find, consciously and unconsciously? 

Perhaps there are degrees of truth. Nothing is _ever_ completely true, not even those numbers and words and letters that Jet Star taught you so long ago. And maybe things go up and down the scale of truth.

Here’s one: Night Fire is dead because of you. Not completely. You could have saved her, but Cyanide could have too. The problem is that your mind wants to blame you.

So maybe her death isn’t completely your fault.

But the Fabulous Four’s deaths are. They saved you because you got captured, they _died_ because they were saving you. It was your fault for getting caught, and it was your fault that they died. It’s not at a hundred degrees of Truth, Truth with a capital “T”, but you think it’s pretty close.

One day, you come across an empty field littered with BLi body bags. You stand at the edge for a minute, staring at the plastic-like material the white bags are made from, the black smiley face stamped on. What is the difference, in the end, between you and the dracs? You kill the same, you die the same. Maybe you don’t live the same, but death happens more than life ever will. Everybody dies, but not everyone _lives_. 

Have you really lived all these years? Wandering from Zone to Zone, searching for something that may very well be lost in the winds of the desert? Then letting go of that one thing, and deciding, for once, that you will live as you wish to, only to lose everything again. Is _this_ living?

You still don’t know. 

You take a step into the empty battlefield. Two wooden posts dig into the dry earth, holding up a black and white sign. 

**_RECLAIMED_ **

**_FUTURE SITE OF SOMETHING BETTER_ **

Something better. Ha. Your first instinct is to laugh, because laughing is better than crying. Because maybe, just _maybe_ , things will hurt less.

But you don’t do anything.

Instead, you open one of the body bags. The tough plastic material it’s made of helps insulate everything within, keeping the bodies they hold warm and safe against the desert winds. You unzip the bag and carefully extract the bones. The body is long gone, the cloth and flesh already rotted away. It must have been left out in the open air before it was pushed into the BLi body bag, because the sand has left clear marks on the yellowing bones. You don’t know if the bones had belonged to a killjoy or a drac. 

You curl into the body bag, blocking out the lingering scent of the long-dead body. Your cat slips in, snuggling against you, and you push your pack of supplies to the bottom of the bag. The radio runs beside it, the static seeming to permeate the unnatural silence instead of breaking it.

You look at the stars, always waiting, always watching. Then you zip the body bag up around you, hiding your tears from the stars’ watchful eyes.

You fall asleep to the sound of static.

* * *

When the static clears, it’s morning. Heat is starting to make its way through the body bag that you’re lying in.

You can hear Dr. Death Defying’s familiar voice, drawling and deep, coming from your radio. He’s talking about some new type of BLi bomb, made from the bugs that scuttle throughout the desert. 

You unzip the body bag and sit up. The cat climbs out first, wandering a few feet away. 

You listen to Dr. Death’s voice with half an ear, and begin what has become routine at this point. You check your charges in your gun and flatten your hair. The gun’s charges are full, as always.

You stand, stretch, and take your bag. 

“Hurry up,” you say to the cat. “If we want to eat today, we’re gonna have to see Chow Mein.”

You still go to his sales, and he still haggles with you over prices, but he doesn’t try to talk about the Fab Four with you anymore. He, along with the rest of the desert, knows just how useless you are. You couldn’t save them from BLi. You’re just another piece of lost hope, another sip of the poisoned water they no longer drink. Not your water, anyway.

You begin to grab your radio when the Doctor starts, “On a sadder note, and in the words of our most poetic DJ, Cherri Cola…”

You haven’t talked to Cherri in years. You left him behind just like you left everyone else. You feel a twinge of regret, but you suppose that your distance from him was what kept him safe. Everyone around you always seems to die, so maybe it’s for the best.

Cherri Cola’s voice picks up where the Doctor’s ended. “It’s been twelve years since the four-man banger cell gave their colors to end BLi’s white cries. _They_ called themselves _killjoys_.”

You freeze at that. Twelve years. Fuck, it’s been twelve _years_ since they died. You’ve lost track of time while traveling through the desert, and you haven’t exactly been aware of everything you’ve been doing. 

You’re twenty now, then. You may be short and young looking, but twenty years in the desert is enviable. Some barely get four. 

_I haven’t done anything with those years, have I?_ The thought catches in your brain, like a splinter of wood catching on cloth. 

Before you let it stick, though, you say to the cat, “Let’s go.”

Cherri continues, “Today the guns don’t sound the same, the colors that we now _buy_ , and the clothes are all the wrong size… yet _we_ call ourselves killjoys.”

It’s true. The Fabulous Four were always _more_ than the desert. More colorful. Louder. More alive.

Some of that has drained out of today’s ‘joys. Some of that energy manifests differently.

“Empty spaces. Lost traces. Battery City races. Getting taller as our desert—” Static cuts through Cola’s voice for a moment. “—smaller. Dreams. Visions. Suicide missions. Anniversaries are lies if we forget why the confetti flies.”

You begin to walk from the battlefield, your cat following close behind.

“This morning, before the mask hides your eyes and last night’s blood dries, before the bodies at the roadside rise, send your thoughts to the sky in hopes that their memories weren’t taken along with their lives—” The sound devolves into static again.

Cliffs rise up around you, their imposing figures casting shadows as you walk to the Paradise Motel. It’s one of Tommy’s many setups in Zone Six, where patrols are the lightest and he can sell more.

You still have never gone beyond Zone Six, though you hear that whoever comes back from what used to be Zone Seven is burned alive by the radiation.

Doctor Death picks up again and finishes the speaking part of the broadcast by saying, “And it looks like our two minutes of morning static is almost up. This slaughter-matic mouth needs to hit the red before I end up DJ’ing for the dead.”

You don’t know what you will do if Dr. Death Defying dies, too. Maybe you will finally give up on trying to protect your family, however scattered they are. Maybe you will run into what used to be Zone Seven and never come back. Maybe you really will burn BLi to the crowd. 

You push your mind away from those thoughts before they can spiral too badly. 

After all, BL/ind will never get to Doctor Death Defying, not completely. They will never get to you, or DJ Cherri Cola, or Show Pony. 

The broadcast makes you realize that BLi had never really gotten to the Fabulous Killjoys. Their shadows live on without them, their memories linger in the crevices of the desert, in each corner of every killjoy’s mind.

Better Living Industries will try to burn down everything in the desert. 

But you realize, then, that they’ll never really succeed. Everyone in the Zones is burned into the stars, their memories and ghosts made from the colors they wore and the scars they bore; every bit of them is seared into the sky.

Killjoys may be lost, but they never die.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, since I am already blatantly copying off of [TheElusiveOllie,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie) I may as well copy their endnotes as well. All credits go to them on most of the fanon information (Like selectively mute Jet, the first breakout of Battery City, etc.) as well as a few lines I particularly loved and may have repurposed (“The rope that is fate still binds you…”, “...ghosts in your shadow”, etc.).  
>   
> Here are my references:  
> 1\. There are many instances of me using lyrics and quotes from Danger Days (the album and the comics) and I’m not going to list them, but I am sure you can find them.  
> 2\. “The world is so, _so_ big. And you want to see all of it.” This is a reworded reference to VE Schwab’s _Shades of Magic_ trilogy.  
> 3\. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I think most of you can flash back to English or History class and know that that quote is by Sir John Dalberg-Acton and not me.  
> 4\. “The world ends slowly, then all at once,” is a rewording/rewriting to John Green’s, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.”  
> 5\. “A person can only stumble for so long until they either fall or stand up straight,” is a reworded quote from Brandon Sanderson’s _The Well of Ascension_.  
> 6\. “...being the hard truth where everyone else would be the kind lie.” This is a rephrased quote from Leigh Bardugo’s _Six of Crows_ duology  
> 7\. “Battles are fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out,” is another quote from VE Schwab’s _Shades of Magic_ trilogy.  
> 8\. “...claws that you call caring…” is yet another VE Schwab reference.  
> 9\. “...you used to pretend that the broken glass were diamonds.” Yes, this is a Northern Downpour reference.  
> 10\. The whole “truth” thing at the end is a conversation one of my betas had with me at three am. Yes I am putting this here.  
> 11\. And lastly, the title is a line from Edgar Allen Poe's _A City in the Sea_.  
>   
> My killjoy OCs Night Fire and Silver Cyanide are, strangely, not references, but I do have a backstory for one of them. If anyone wants to play with them, go ahead. As for a few things about them, yes, they are romantically involved, and yes, Night is basically my self-insert. If you choose to play with either of them, please kindly punch them in the face for me; my OCs do not deserve rights and that’s on God. As for Riot, I made him up at the last minute and I do not care what you do with him. My OCs are free real estate, y’all.  
>   
> This was weird for me because I rarely write in present tense and never in second person. This is partly a product of my random obsessions and partly because TheElusiveOllie’s writing is so damn good (If you’re reading this, thank you for every piece of writing you put out). And again, I give my life to my betas, [Katie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illyrian_Shadowhunter) and [Cat](https://night-lightning17.tumblr.com), who will forever be appreciated.  
>   
> Edit: Again, [here](https://tapefish.tumblr.com/post/615892402584092672/from-this-fic-by-nightwing-hunter-cause-i-got) is the art that [tapefish](https://tapefish.tumblr.com/) made, and [this](https://nightwing-hunter.tumblr.com/tagged/no-rays-from-the-holy-heaven-come-down-extras) is the tag for extras/other POVs for parts of this fic!  
>   
> Again, here is my [tumblr](https://eluvion.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk. I will probably be back to my angsty bullshit in a few weeks, but in the meantime, thank you for reading this and keep running <3 <3 <3


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